It’s so bloody obvious when they have to over-promote a movie to death using the same two funny lines over and over again that such a movie is SURE to bomb. Can’t Hollywood see this when they must resort to such promotional tactics? - Jinx
Are you talking about something specifically?
Oh, by the time the film is ready for a big ad campaign, the studio is doubtlessly aware if the film is any good or not. (“Bomb” isn’t really a matter of quality. Many excellent films have bombed because no one went to see them) But by that time, the studio has already spent tens of millions of dollars on the film. If they don’t release it, the entire thing is a total loss. If they do release it, they can recoup at least some of their money. In the long term, counting foreign markets and video, they are almost certain to not only make their money back, but turn a tidy profit.
The other side of the coin is, regardless of quality, there is simply no Earthly way to know ahead of time how well a film is going to do. Look at the recent trend towards tasteless, gross-out humor. Considering the wild success of the Faralley brothers and films like American Pie, it would seem that the more you ramp up the juvenile ick factor, the more money you are going to make. Top it off with a easily recognizable star with a hit TV show and a cult following, and you’d think that you’d have a guaranteed hit on your hands. Yet Freddy Got Fingered with a total failure. Just goes to show that you can, in fact, underestimate the taste of the American public.
It must be hard to detect whe something is going to be a bomb. After all, the moviemakers have spent a lot of money and probably effort in the undertaking and they don’t really know how it will turn out until it is finnished, so I think they get into a bit of denial about how bad it really is. After all, you never know, it might turn out that people actually like it, even if a moviemaker knows it is crap. How else can you explain the success of any Adam Sandler movie? I know someone said: Hey THIS STINKS when they made the Waterboy, but still, people went to see it.
It must be hard to detect whe something is going to be a bomb. After all, the moviemakers have spent a lot of money and probably effort in the undertaking and they don’t really know how it will turn out until it is finnished, so I think they get into a bit of denial about how bad it really is. After all, you never know, it might turn out that people actually like it, even if a moviemaker knows it is crap. How else can you explain the success of any Adam Sandler movie? I know someone must have said: Hey THIS STINKS when they made the Waterboy, but still, people went to see it.
It must be hard to detect whe something is going to be a bomb. After all, the moviemakers have spent a lot of money and probably effort in the undertaking and they don’t really know how it will turn out until it is finnished, so I think they get into a bit of denial about how bad it really is. After all, you never know, it might turn out that people actually like it, even if a moviemaker knows it is crap. How else can you explain the success of any Adam Sandler movie? I know someone must have said: Hey THIS STINKS when they made the Waterboy, but still, people went to see it.
The problem is that the ones who go to the movies the most are kids, and they were raised by MTV. The have MTV mentality, and they believe what they see on TV.
If MTV hypes a movie, it will do well. See FAst and the Furious (crap, though funny) and Save the Last Dance.
Occasionally that method backfires, but overall, it works. Most movies count on that opening weekend to recoup the cost of the film. If that doesn’t happen, and the movie is really awful, the studios are screwed, and they know it. So they deluge us with ads to get us convinced that it’s a “must see”.
Ah well. At least I have my FM radio…
I was watching a documentary on moviemaking some time ago, and it had a little interview with a Hollywood executive type, who said that out of every 10 movies made, 1 is a blockbuster, 1-2 do reasonably well, 2-3 break even, and all the rest bomb. He went on to say that Hollywood could actually make more money by taking what they have to the bank and putting it all in a savings account.
Plus even if a movie doesn’t earn back its cost in the theaters, there’s always video and DVD. There have been plenty of movies that stunk at the box office and then recouped their losses on home video (not to mention the sometimes-lucrative international market).
In case people have forgotten…
Just a few months before “Titanic” was released, EVERYTHING I’d read and heard about it suggested that it was going to be James Cameron’s “Heaven’s Gate.” I kept reading that it was 20, then 50, then 100 million dollars over budget, that it was a month, 2 months, 6 months behind schedule. It had “fiasco” written all over it.
And then it became the biggest hit of all time.
Which only goes to show that William Goldman was right- in Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.”
“No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.”
-H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore
You write the GREATEST SCRIPT EVER WRITTEN about an Italian grandfather coming to America to find his last heir.
You find an agent. She suggests changing the title, and she will submit it.
You change the title.
The MAJOR STUDIO puts it into their development department.
One of a team of 5 - 10 people put it on their stack of scripts to read. Hope you don’t have Robby reading it as he is going through a bad breakup and hates anything that doesn’t end in the girlfriend getting killed.
Luckily Chuck reads it. He sorta likes it but makes some notes: Change main character from Italian Grandfather to a 20 something guy from Beverly Hills. Make the ending a bit more upbeats. He sends it on upstairs.
Upstairs hears that THE STAR is looking for something quirky. They suggest your script, but instead of a 20 something guy from Beverly Hills, make it a 38 year old woman from Malibu and give the damn thing a happy end. They offer $ , , .00 and you scurry back to your computer.
Weeks later you turn it in. They pay you.
Your script goes to a committee. It is sent for 3,4,5 or more rewrites.
Development hell. The STAR changes her mind. A new STAR is attached.
Five years later, after arbitration, your name is credited in fine print and you go to see the premere of a film about a British teenager (hot new star from England) coming to America to hook up with her cousin - a hooker in LA - and they rob a bank and fall in love with the security guards.
At the studio screening, all the top brass agree the film sucks. Someone gets fired (usually in Development Department). But…they already spent $$$$, so…in the ads, plug the funny scene with the STAR getting wet in her tshirt. That’ll get the 20 year old boys to come on opening weekend and bring a date.
To no one’s surprise, the film bombs.
Your friends all secretly wonder why you ever wrote such crap, but congratulate you heartily on your first big Hollywood success.
The above is a very true account of several films I have seen move through the studio.
How can anyone tell what is going to be a bomb? “It’s a Wonderful Life” was a box-office flop when it was released. Now it’s rated number 24 on the IMDb’s list of all-time great movies.
Or “Little Shop of Horrors?” No budget, no name stars (it was just Jack Nicholson’s second movie), silly script, but now it is considered a cult classic and has inspired a Broadway musical which is itself the source for another movie.
If you read through the user comments in the IMDb, you will discover that for almost every movie that has more than a few user comments, someone believes it is trash and someone else thinks it is a wonderful movie. Who are you going to believe?
DMark, thank you very much. I’ve shunned scriptwriting, now you’ve completely convinced me. I generally don’t like novels that were even written by two people. No wonder Hollywood produces so much lackluster crud.
I imagine much of what’s been said in the thread is right, so I’ll just add an observation that I gleaned from the multi-billion dollar tourist industry. Bear in mind that like movie making, this is one of the largest industries in the world.
A major problem for tourism is fickle taste. Suppose a country is the “hot pick” for the year. The place becomes swamped. But of its 20 memorable sites, 90% of the people see the top one, 80% might see the next most famous, 60% the next most famous, going down to about number 10, which sees almost no traffic at all, even in a good year. The lesser sites aren’t uninteresting, it’s just that in a 5 day stay, people want to see the “best”.
The following year, somebody publishes a travel guide, or does a TV travel special. Whoops. Suddenly everybody wants to see the attraction ranked 18th. And the place that was third last year? It’s yesterday’s news. The hotels are vacant. Businesses go broke.
So, to get back to the OP, sometimes a movie’s popularity is just dumb luck. Not based on quality at all, but appearances on the Tonight Show, failed relationships in the National Enquirer, or… something that strikes the mood of the masses.
I don’t know about you, but when I watch some movies that won Academy Awards, particularly those from decades ago, I wonder WTF, how did these movies ever get released, let alone win awards? Answer? Different audience, different expectations. PR. Luck.
In some respects, yes they can.
8 out of 10 times (give or take 
) if the ad promotes the music - “featuring the latest hit songs from ‘Doggie Bone’, ‘The Hump Masters’ and [insert band here]” you know the studio’s just scraping the bottom of the barrel hoping desperately that they can con enough people to see it opening night before someone loses their job.
I mean…buy the freakin’ CD. Who goes to a movie to hear the music?
At some level they can. Look at all those films from major studios that get shelved for years, go straight to video, or turn up on cable first. They didn’t consider these films worth the expense of a wide theatrical release and marketing campaign. Or when they dump a film out there during late winter/early spring after the Oscars but before the summer blockbusters, hoping people will go see it because it’s a new release and there’s nothing else out.
The best analysis of this phenomenon was the book THE DEVIL’S CANDY, which examined the making of BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES.
Reduced to the basics, there was never a single catastrophic moment whent he filmmakers knew their film was a failure. Rather a series of well-intentioned decisions (some forced by necessities of scheduling and budget, others by a desire to give the stars more likeable characters to play) gradually undermined the movie. By the time it was test-screend for an audience, everyone involved knew there was little or no hope that the film would be a success, so it’s not as if they were surprised by the failure at the box office that followed.
One should perhaps add that, once upon a time, some movies were shelved indefinitely if they were terrible. Now, they might end up going directly to video or cable or syndicated television. Or portions may be reshot to try to “save” the film. Something like this happened with TOWN & COUNTRY, which sat on the shelf for a year or two before finally coming out. With Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Andie MacDowell, Gary Shandling, Natasha Kinski and Charlton Heston in the movie, it was a bit too high profile to just sweep under the rug and forget about it. The film didn’t come close to making its money back in theatres, but I guess something is better than nothing, and the theatrical release bolsters the revenues from “ancilary” markets like video and television.
A lot of the films mentioned above as going “straight to video” were not produced by the studios and, aside from hopes and dreams of the filmaker, were never intended for wide release. They are “pick ups” from small production companies, or independents that cannot afford the cost of distribution. Have you ever gone into Blockbuster and seen a single copy of some film you have never heard of before? Some might even star a famous actor/actress. That is probably one of these kinds of films. The studio picks up a few titles like this, puts them in their library of films and can sell packages better to cable and video outlets.
Sometimes they pick up these little films to get in good with a director they think might do better things in the future, or they pick it up to make nice with the star who financed/produced/wrote the film. These films are not really bombs, as very little money was invested, and the goal was not to make a bundle off the film anyway. A few of these films make more money by word of mouth in video shops than they did in their limited theater runs (Chuck & Buck, Saving Grace, Waking Ned Devine, etc.)
My pet peeve is the movie “Ishtar” with Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. Normally, I’m easy to please but this movie really stank up the joint. I have no excuse because I’d heard the movie was really bad and I still went to see it. Probably because it was the only new thing around. Anyway, both Warren and Dustin were big stars at the time. Couldn’t either one (or both) of them keep the film from being released and embarrassing them with the bad reviews it got? Are there any stars who have enough clout to just not release a bad movie?
Sinatra was able to keep Manchurian Candidate off the screen for decades - not because it was a bomb, but because it dealt with the assasination of a President and was scheduled to be released shortly after Kennedy was assasinated.