By Garen Daly
Creativity is lacking in Hollywood. This is no surprise. Since the first movies, critics have complained how films pander to the masses and how they lack imagination. Has it gotten worse? To find out, let’s look at remakes and sequels.
Remakes and sequels are as standard in Hollywood as blonde starlets and rapacious agents. The Maltese Falcon, one of the great Bogart films of all time, had been made several times before the classic was filmed. Good stories are remade. Profitable films have sequels made until the well runs dry. There’s nothing wrong with this. It makes good business sense, but what has changed is the financial paradigm. This paradigm impels sequels or a remakes.
The reason lies in the Hollywood’s current economics model. The average film costs around $70 million to make. Toss in publicity and advertising and you add another $35 million. To bring a film to the megaplex screen, you’re looking at over $100 million.
In the world of distribution and exhibition, for every dollar taken in at the box office, 50¢ is kept by the theater. For a $100 million film to break even, it needs to gross $200 million, a difficult and dicey proposition.
Keep that in the back of your mind.
A second factor is you. Yes, reader, you, the film goer, is part of the problem. Why? Because you are constantly bombarded for your entertainment dollar. A recent study revealed the average urban dweller sees 3000 to 5000 ad messages per day. That works out to one every 14.4 seconds. Not all of these are for movies, but within these daily bombardments Hollywood ads are shouting at you. This means there is way too much clutter out there. Advertising fatigue is the term. With so many ads, how does a message cut through the clutter and reach your receptive ears?
One way is to find projects with built in brand recognition. These are projects already linked to your entertainment radar. It is simple, when you, the cinema consumer ‘hears’ a message on something you already know, it breaks through the clutter. Alvin & the Chipmunks is going to be a huge hit this Christmas. Parents know them. Ang LeeThey will bring their kids. In one swoop, fifty percent of the movie going demographic will see the film. This initial interest will generate a big opening weekend and these days, the opening weekend makes 50% of a film’s total domestic gross.
Sequels and remakes are all about finances and awareness. It’s that simple. How long will this go on? Consider this, even flops are the Hollywood remake. Oscar winner Ang Lee’s big flop The Hulk, has spawned a Hulk 2. So it doesn’t matter if was a hit or miss. What matter is it’s awareness factor making it easy to market, and thus generating big bucks for Hollywood’s corporate overlords.
Will remakes or sequels ever stop? Until there is a resurgence in creativity and less reliance on bean counters running the business, no.
Garen has been sitting in the dark for over 30 years as an film exhibitor, consultant and reviewer. You may have seen him on NE Cable or some other Boston station. More likely you heard him pontificating about films on NPR, TKK, RKO, New Hampshire Public Radio, or any number of other stations he's been on, but one thing is certain, he loves, and knows, film.
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Comments: 10
I tired of sequels and remakes
How do you feel about these questions when it comes to sequels and remakes? I want to clarify that these questions come from the viewpoint of someone who remembers many ORIGINAL movies as well as a younger member of the family who does not.
So here goes:
1. When The Fugitive was made into a movie, many people did not remember the original Fugitive tv show. So was this a remake? Same thing with Charlie's Angels. Enough time had passed that my son saw Charlie's Angels, the movie, with fresh eyes and one might argue that there was a cultural diversity to the "angels" in the movie that there wasn't in the tv show.
I recently panned a movie and the screenwriter was kind enough to contact me and explain how the movie was NOT what he and his co-writer had created. So there is that as well, panel audiences who determine endings in movies, making it harder for creative souls to get their movies to come out as they'd planned. When so much is at stake financially, I don't know the answer.
Finally, what connect do you see between the many choices for entertainment, from cable to video games....and movies? When I was a kid, people took a chance and saw movies because there wasn't much choice. It was that or spend another hot summer night listening to the cicadas or watching tv repeats on FOUR channels, not 154 channels and there was no computer or internet or video games either. No text messaging on video phones. No I-Pods or YouTube.
You get my drift, I'm sure.
That should make everyone wonder.
The number of ads you mentioned x day is scary, no wonder people have lost the ability to think, brain washing I presume.
The level of intelligence and creativity in the movies matches that of the masses?
The ones who listen to the advertisement?
The creativity is missing because of the inability of the masses to stop watching idiotic movies.
There are some good movies but one has to look for them.
Good article, thanks for the opportunity to comment on this, a subject dear to my heart.
I left TV, and movies in the gutter 15 years ago, now I buy what I choose and watch it at home.
At first glance it does seem odd that most movies are for pre-adolescent and teenage males (grouped as such by either biological age or mental maturity). As a percentage of the population, they must be minuscule....
Since the largest percentage of the population is now entering the senior citizen category--why don't the movies reflect their tastes?
I think it has to do with the audience and the self-feeding cycle created by churning out the same drivel. There is a gullibility factor that keeps older people away from the theater...older people have little time and even less patience for crappy movies. After being burned more than a few times, people in this age group will wait for the DVD or for it to air on TV. Teenagers, like lemmings, rush off to see the latest crap starring Will Ferrel or some other idiot every time the Pavlovian bell rings. Once they outgrow that crap, it isn't long before they stop showing up as well.