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Hollywood's Love of Analytics Couldn't Prevent Six Massive Blockbuster Flops
Nerval's Lobster writes "In June, Steven Spielberg predicted that Hollywood was on the verge of an 'implosion' in which 'three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing to the ground.' The resulting destruction, he added, could change the film industry in radical and possibly unwelcome ways. And sooner than he may have thought, the implosion has arrived: in the past couple weeks, six wannabe blockbusters have cratered at the North American box office: 'R.I.P.D.,' 'After Earth,' 'White House Down,' 'Pacific Rim,' and 'The Lone Ranger.' These films featured big stars, bigger explosions, and top-notch special effects—exactly the sort of summer spectacle that ordinarily assures a solid run at the box office. Yet all of them failed to draw in the massive audiences needed to earn back their gargantuan budgets. Hollywood's more reliant than ever on analytics to predict how movies will do, and even Google has taken some baby-steps into that arena with a white paper describing how search-query patterns and paid clicks can estimate how well a movie will do on its opening weekend, but none of that data seems to be helping Hollywood avoid shooting itself in the foot with a 'Pacific Rim'-sized plasma cannon. In other words, analytics can help studios refine their rollout strategy for new films—but the bulk of box-office success ultimately comes down to the most elusive and unquantifiable of things: knowing what the audience wants before it does, and a whole lot of luck."
Don't do the following: 1) make shitty movies (overbroad but use the smell test) 2) Make sequels to shitty movies that might have barely made a profit 3) Make 18 superhero movies, reboot them, and complain when they flop 4) Don't let a fucking formula from a has-been screenwriter dictate the structure of every movie (http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/8947871/The-origin-of-the-latest-Hollywood-formula) You can pay me now or later. I just want a 1% cut of all new movies.
Great special effects. Story was not engaging. Didn't care about the characters. It's about the story. But with the way movies are funded I assume producers stick their $.02 in and then the studios stick their $.02 and by the time the director is done satisfying everyone the movie is as bland as can be. Spielberg is right but he is also part of the problem.
In 1967, following the success of "Mary Poppins," Roy Disney said that the Disney studio ought to have "at least one 'Mary Poppins' every year."
There's nothing new about the money people wishing there was a simple formula that they could get rid of all the pesky issues of creativity, talent, and the public's taste.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Would be nice if our culture just became weary of entertainment cartel offerings, and people could once again take up more productive pastimes: making things, group outings and sports, exercise, hobbies...anything besides sitting on butts and watching brain numbing nonsense (yes, I'm as guilty as anyone)
Sad thing is, it doesn't have to be an XOR function between the two sets of activities. What really sucks is that a large part of our cultural output is seen as entirely entertainment oriented. Perhaps what we're seeing is that the upcoming younger generations see this and come to our same conclusions - and thus the disappointing flops.
Maybe instead of trying to artificially create the memes and hashtags on the social networks, Hollywood ought to listen to what's being said and take that for inspiration? I guess that's just really much more effort than rehashing the same damn blockbuster formula over and over again.
In other news, the economy aint doing so swell either - and my Netflix queue is quite long...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
The same thing that is killing USA's Auto companies (save tesla), Boeing, and hollywood, is that MBA's now run things.
Don't forget Las Vegas.
I heard that the plots and scripts are being dumbed-down so that they translate better into foreign markets, especially China. So instead of one culture enjoying a movie, none of them do.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I came up with the exact same summation; too much Indiana Jones. Some parts were great. Bilbo and Gollum under the mountain were truly excellent; it really did the book justice. The trolls weren't bad. The dwarf backstory was ok, going far beyond the book and doing it well.
But damn... Radagast the rabbit sledding superhero? The interminable goblin chase sequence....? wow. The whole mountain giant sequence was an exercise in excessive CGI combined with some unexplainable contempt for continuity. At some point during production someone had to think "wtf is this?"
There are two more. It is conceivable they didn't promulgate these mistakes to the remainder, but given that they've undertaken to stretch this relatively simple story over, what, 7.5 to 8 hours of movie... we could be in for a lot more fail.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Maybe they'll start making... (gasp)... actual plots to accompany those stars/explosions/special effects?
General: Mr. Bay, can you think of any idea how to outwit these terrorists?
Michael Bay: I believe I can. We start... by making a big CG building and then we have a meteor go CROSSHH! and it, and it's all like CRAAWWW a-and motorcycles burst into flame while they jump over these helicopters, right?
General: No no! We need ideas how to stop the terrorists!
Michael Bay: An eighteen-wheeler spins out of control and it's all like BROSSHH! And then this huuuge tanker full of dyna-
General: Those aren't ideas, those are special effects!
Michael Bay: I... don't understand the difference.
General: I know you don't. Get him out of here!
(South Park, "Imaginationland")
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
In all fairness this is one you can't blame on our culture. Blockbuster movies need to be international. International means they can't have as much culture. Pure action translates well to large audiences worldwide, the more plot the more character the worse it translates.
This one you can blame the 3rd world.
Exactly, this desire for international release is a big part of the problem.
Of course without international release budgets need to come down.
Depends on what you mean by group outings, sports and exercize.
http://i0.wp.com/pennsicwp.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/pennsic37_ammo_wagon.jpg
http://thebeatofyounglosangeles.blogspot.com/2011/04/check-it-quidditch-comes-to-la.html
Inception. (Heck, this one so intricate, is prompted multiple viewings, group viewings, and discussions that didn't reach agreement.)
The Matrix. (Not surprisingly, the sequels were useless.)
Or use of of the already existing plots? There are literally dozens of sci-fi books I'd LOVE to see on the big screen. Heinlein's The Moon is A Harsh Mistress or Stranger In A Strange Land. Niven's Ringworld, or any of his Known Space stories. Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept, or Incarnations of Immortality series.
Yes, Hollywood has done a few. Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters by Heinlein, for example. But they did them... WRONG.
... is the day Analytics get to rule the world.
Human beings are famous for being irrational.
True, we are predictable, but, as irrational beings, our so-called "predictability" is not actually that "predictable", after all.
Blockbuster movies become blockbuster movies because they somehow sync with the audiences. Be it King Kong or Casablanca or Star Wars or Gone With The Wind, they sell because the fulfill something that the audiences need - either to be entertained, or to be informed, or to be enlightened.
Lately, actually not lately, but has been for the past several decades, Hollywood has lost its touch.
Instead of producing movies that can fulfill the needs of the audiences, Hollywood has been relying on formulas, sequels, and remakes of old classics.
The "Analytics", sad to say, is just a new name for their formula Hollywood has been relying upon since the 1980's.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's a big part of the problem.
I think one of the key differentiators here is the amount of starting capital. Movies outside of the Hollywood machine might have the budgets for at least a certain level of special effects but because they don't have the marketing budget to ever think about attaining blockbuster status, there's no incentive to have to rake back in hojillions of profits because that money was never spent in the first place. As such, there's no desire to pander to every single market and thus less of a chance that your movies comes out as blandly homogenised-by-committee crap. Take Looper, or Prometheus for example. Set themselves up to say something brilliant and profoud about their retrospective environments, and then didn't.
Honestly, I don't really care that much about the plot re-use; there are only so many plots and so many ways you can fit them into 2hrs, but so many big-budget movies recently seem to have actually forgotten how to deliver them with style (or indeed at all in many cases). The effects all look the same, the characters are all the same.
Eurotrash pontificating here, but this is why I've ended up like euro-centric cinema the most these days. There's a fair few attempts at effects-laden hokum but most of the stuff tends to revolve around some sort of a character study in $period_setting. Cheap to film but requires good acting/directing and a solid script. My favourite example of these came as a recommendation from a friend to see Il Divo, examining Giulio Andreotti, an Italian politician with incredible staying power. I know, I'd never heard of him either, but he's painted like a real-life version of Francis Urquhart. It's an immensely stylish swoop through Italian politics and corruption and general hideousness with fantastically opulent trappings and a convoluted plot. It got next to no publicity here in the UK but all the Italians I knew were raving about it (and thankfully we have enough indie cinemas here that you can guarantee that most of these films will receive some sort of showing, at least in London). The same director has done at least two other films with the same lead actor, Tony Servillo, all character studies and, by and large, examining completely different themes and all, IMHO, enthralling viewing.
Also IHMO (and yes, I'm trying to be objective about the rose-tinted specs effect), Hollywood's last "golden period" was something like 1998 to 2005 where a lot of movies with interesting ideas or themes, or even just old ones but with a radical new style, came out and a large chunk of it's output since then has been distinctly boring. Thankfully, as Hollywood history has shown, this is usually a cyclical thing and after the current swathe of identikit superheroes and invading CGI monsters collapse under their own weight we'll hopefully see interesting ideas brought to the fore again.
£0.02
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