According to this Variety article, the moguls in Tinseltown are puzzling, once again, over why people seem less than enthusiastic about trekking down to the local megagoogleplex and sitting through the most recent formulaic schlock they’ve seen fit to grace us with.
Of course, one thing they’ve neglected to do in their quest for answers (and box office profits) is ask the viewing public what it is that they want. Now, I can only speak for myself, but the only thing that will get me out of my house to watch a movie, as opposed to eventually renting the DVD, is originality.
Taking a quick cruise through some box office hits, we do find some derivative schlock there… Star Wars the Phantom Menace, for instance. Independence Day. How the Grinch Marketed Christmas. Bad movies, IMHO, with bad plots, but not too bad in terms of marketing, or exploiting franchise opportunities, or sheer timing. So, sometimes the formula plots and stock characters actually work, but at a cost of a fantastic budjet for marketing and promotional tie-ins.
But on the other hand, in this same blockbuster list (found at the IMDB,, natch), we see… The Sixth Sense. Forrest Gump. E.T. the Extra Terrestrial. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Jaws. Ghostbusters. The Blair Witch Project. The Matrix.
Now, I’m not saying that all of these are good movies. Instead, they were movies that, for their time, were original. Raiders brought pulp fiction back from the dead, and the box office has been living off it since. The Sixth Sense brought the dead back from the dead, and creeped out millions; it proved that American audiences could appreciate a slow-paced film. Blair Witch, for all its faults, sums up my argument; people want to see experiments. The movie-going audience wants original, interesting movies, that we haven’t seen a thousand times before.
The lamentations of the executives behind such dreck as Lara Croft Tomb Raider, Pearl Harbor, and The Fast and the Furious ring out across the entertainment landscape, and the public turns a deaf ear to them, and stays home to watch Titanic on video yet again. “Why,” ask the executives, “why aren’t they going to see these recycled plots, tired effects, rehashed action sequences, and uninteresting stars?” We’ve seen it. If we’re going to shell out eight bucks, we want something new.
The special effects available to us have finally reached the point where anything, absolutely anything, can be put on film. Why rehash the same old plots, when the universe and all its possibilities have been opened up to you? It’s like having a genie appear, and grant you a wish, and you wish for a ham sandwich.
I know for a fact that there are millions of screenplays out there, ready to be made. They range from poor to execrable, mostly, but a few stand out. Take some risks on the ones with ideas, for once; find a promising screenplay, and don’t run it through the Hollywood Formula Machine, just maybe polish it a bit, and run with it. Trust your writers, for once, over your executives. Take the budjet that you’re thinking of putting into Lousy Remake Part 3 and give it to a promising director with an actual vision, before he’s forced to make eighteen awful films and has to develop the patented Hollywood Jaded Exterior.
You’re in the business of dreams, but you’re letting business rule you; the dreams that Hollywood turns out are, mostly, the dreams of middle management. We want the dreams of heroes, and visionaries, and madmen. They don’t fit into your formulas and actuarial tables; they can’t guarantee you a profit. But neither can your formulaic attempts at banality, as you should already know. There is no reason not to risk it.
