posted 06-20-2013 12:20 PM                       

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The big studios don't make much of an effort to market smaller movies (and that's understandable considering the high cost of advertising).

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I sat in a virtually empty theater watching Hoop Dreams the one week it showed here in Lawton.

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posted 06-25-2013 11:10 AM                    

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Why Spielberg and Lucas are Wrong About the Film Industry Implosion
6/20/2013 @ 11:32AM by Scott Mendelson, Contributor

If you had asked me four years ago, I may well have agreed with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas‘s statements last week regarding the eventual ‘implosion’ of the film industry. But today I see a slow comeback of sorts for the very kind of old-school ‘movie’ that is called all-but-extinct every single summer. It’s no coincidence that these kind of ‘cinema is dead!’ pronouncements come about during the summer season, when it does seem like the theaters churn out nothing but would-be event films every single weekend. But if you look a little closer, and especially if you look outside of the summer season, you’ll see a return of the kind of smartly-budgeted, often star-driven *movie* that everyone claims never gets made anymore. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s actually better and healthier for audiences than it was even half-a-decade ago.

Just over the last two months, we’ve had the likes of Iron Man 3 and Monsters University, but also a big-budget version of The Great Gatsby, a low-budget original horror film like The Purge, and a moderately-budgeted all-star caper Now You See Me, all of which will be very profitable. And in the art house scene, we’ve seen the likes of Mud, Before Midnight, Frances Ha, The Bling Ring, and The Place Beyond the Pines. Every weekend there are countless would-be art films that open in limited release. Some of them, like The Spectacular Now in August, will likely expand into quasi-wide release, some of them will be available on Video On Demand before or during their theatrical release, and all of them will eventually be able to be seen on DVD or VOD for those who missed out in theaters. They got made, they will make money, and they will likely be seen by every single person who wants to see them in one viewing format or another.

And this spring also saw mainstream old-school biopics like 42 make nearly $100 million while even Mr. Blockbuster himself Michael Bay delivered a $25 million R-rated crime comedy in the form of Pain and Gain. If you can look beyond the likes of Oz: The Great and Powerful you’ll notice that early 2013 brought us the likes of The Call, Stoker, Broken City, Identity Thief, Side Effects, and Beautiful Creatures. Some of these films weren’t very good and some of them weren’t box office hits, but they all are the kind of non-tentpole films that everyone says aren’t getting made anymore, yet they all got made and they all played in multiplexes alongside the likes of Jack the Giant Slayer and A Good Day To Die Hard. Harmony Korine of all people had a genuine mainstream hit this spring with Spring Breakers. 2012 saw an absolute deluge of wide release ‘regular movies’ and successful art house expansions year-round, many of them R-rated, which I wrote about last year. If this year’s output isn’t as strong so far (and frankly it’s not), well that’s just the random luck of the annual release schedule.

Speaking of Jack the Giant Slayer, Lucas and Spielberg’s assertion that ‘three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground’ already happened, and yet the world didn’t end. We’ve had the mega-budgeted flops like John Carter, Battleship, and Jack the Giant Slayer, and the world didn’t end. Green Lantern didn’t destroy Warner Bros. nor will World War Z wreck Paramount if it doesn’t gross enough to justify its $200 million+ budget. There are negative consequences to be sure, as the many many people laid off from Dreamworks in the aftermath of Rise of the Guardians can tell you, but the system didn’t implode even with the alleged doomsday scenario playing out. We can all wish that the studios would learn the right lessons from their hits (Inception‘s success doesn’t mean that audiences want a Total Recall remake) and their flops (Total Recall‘s financial failure means that audiences don’t really crave remakes of relatively recent genre classics), but we’re still seeing plenty of non-tentpoles at a theater near you. What we’ve seen since late 2010 (starting with the likes of The Social Network and The Town) is a return to the kind of budgeting sanity that allows non-fantastical genre films aimed at adults to flourish.

State of Play and Duplicity were held up as signs in 2009 that the adult movie is dead, yet their only sin was costing around $80 million a piece. At $40 million a pop, both films would have been worthwhile long-term investments. That’s the correct lesson that studios eventually learned, as a film like In Time would have cost $75 million back in 2009 but only cost $40 million in late 2011. Ironically, back in early 2011, the media screamed SLUMP! instead of celebrating the relative success of cheaper, leggier films like Limitless, Hanna, The Lincoln Lawyer, and Insidious (you mean Battle: Los Angeles grossed less than Alice In Wonderland? I’m *shocked*!). And even this summer still sees the wide release of such non-tent pole, mainstream films as The To-Do List, 2 Guns, and The Butler. And after the summer season and its endless tent poles has ended, the rest of the year, as per usual, gives us a deluge of smaller, often adult-targeted films.

We’ve got festival-favorite comedies like Don Juan and star-driven thrillers like the Affleck/Timberlake picture Runner Runner in September. We’ve got the ambitious Alfonso Cuaron science-fiction thriller Gravity and the Tom Hanks hostage drama Captain Phillips in October (if you can handle that it’s a remake of a classic Asian horror drama, we’ve got a new Spike Lee thriller in Old Boy for October as well). We’ve got Martin Scorsese’s The Wolves of Wall Street, Last Vegas - a comedy starring Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, Morgan Freeman Kevin, Kline, and Mary Steenburgen, and an African-American-centric musical Black Nativity in November alongside tent poles like Thor: The Dark World and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. And December closes out the year with the usual limited release would-be Oscar breakouts alongside the mainstream ‘Oscar bait’ like Saving Mr. Banks, American Hustle (a David O’Russell drama with Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence) and Monuments Men, a George Clooney-directed thriller concerning attempts to save art work during World War II starring Daniel Craig, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Jean Dujardin. That’s just a sampling, so if you can’t find anything to see in a multiplex, you’re not looking hard enough.

It is not a perfect theatrical distribution system. The industry is still overwhelmingly dominated by white males and the critical masses still give their stories more critical respect than those made by and/or intended for female and/or minority audiences. The advent of 3D and IMAX has meant that certain tent poles take up at least three screens, which means fewer films play at a given theater. While we’ve seen a resurgence in moderately-budgeted genre fare, there is still a lack of genuine outright ‘dramas’ playing in multiplexes outside of October-December. A number of would-be art house films (think Mud or The Place Beyond the Pines this year or Bernie or The Perks of Being A Wallflower last year) are arguably the kind of seemingly mainstream star-driven vehicles that would have been wide releases ten years ago. The would-be smaller films that do make it to multiplexes usually only play there for a week or two, thus cheating the very sort of ‘catch it when it’s convenient’ adult audiences that these films are aimed at. We need a more spaced-out release schedule, so all of the year’s allegedly ‘best films’ aren’t crammed into the last six months of the year, often leaving the rest of the calendar sometimes starved for good movies.

But while there are always horror stories about theoretically good films that couldn’t get financing, the media seems to harp on the ones where the system ‘worked’. Lincoln may have ‘almost been an HBO film’, but it wasn’t and it was a massive worldwide hit last November. Red Tails may have been a struggle, but it got made and was a wide release in early 2012. Paul Thomas Anderson may have struggled to finance The Master, but it got made as he saw fit and played in multiplexes nationwide late last year. Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra probably should have been picked up by a studio for theatrical release, especially as the Michael Douglas/Matt Damon film only cost $23 million to produce, but it got made and it will be seen today by those who have HBO and tomorrow by those who rent the DVD or watch in on Video On Demand. It counts a defeat for the kind of pure dramas lacking in today’s multiplexes, but it still got made as intended.

I don’t discount the struggles of those attempting to get studio backing for somewhat off-the-beaten path pictures in this day-and-age. But what I see is actually a vast improvement in terms of the variety of films being offered at multiplex theaters during the year, especially outside of the core summer movie season. I see mega-budget fantasy spectacles alongside mainstream comedies and R-rated star-driven thrillers. I see animated epics and the newest superhero adventure alongside the next expanding art-house darling and a potential Oscar winner. It’s not perfect. The lack of pure dramas outside of the Oscar season and the smothering emphasis on stories about white men needs to be rectified. But thanks to a resurgence in the kind of old-school ‘movie’ that general adult moviegoers would have flocked to a decade ago, along with the budgeting corrections necessary to make those films profitable, I am more hopeful that I was in mid-2009 when the industry was declaring that the adult and/or R-rated movie was an endangered species.

I don’t pretend to be more knowledgeable about the industry than the likes of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, or Steven Soderbergh, nor would I presume that their commentary comes from anything other than a genuine concern for the field in which they made their mark. We have heard cries about the death of the film industry for nearly as long as the film industry has existed. But I see cautious optimism rather than cause for alarm. We shall see…

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