A few weeks ago, my post on the legacy of Star Wars films prompted an interesting debate in the comments thread.
Syd wrote: “[W]hat saddens me is that the comic book genre is sucking all the oxygen out of the theaters. Shirley Temple’s movies were the most popular films during the Golden Age of Hollywood, but there was still room for everybody. That’s less true today.”
Emily added: “I think that is the problem of modern Hollywood in a nutshell. Yes, Hollywood has loved remaking older properties since the silent era, but nowadays almost EVERYTHING is a remake, reboot, or sequel. While it is true that every artist and poet may be a cannibal or thief to some degree, modern films just throw so much nostalgia fodder and fan service onto screens, references and call backs. . . there was genre variety in Hollywood seventy years ago; nowadays 98% of its output are action pictures.”
This week, I’d like to give my response to these comments. There is an implication here in thoughts like these that movie studios have abandoned huge swaths of the audience in favor of catering to a specific set of tastes, and that the decision makers at the studios are to blame for being so narrow-minded. In fact I think the statistics argue the reverse—that audiences did the abandoning, and Hollywood is doing what it can to please the last remaining diehards. And I’m not at all convinced that modern Hollywood is that narrow-minded.
Scott Timberg writing for Salon this week said “It’s now become commonplace to say that the original Star Wars, with an assist from Jaws, helped kill off the auteurist surge of ‘70s Hollywood that included Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather. What followed was a demand for blockbusters, an obsession with merchandising, endless sequels, and movies aimed at children and teenagers.”
Now, I could point out that Timberg’s list of lost auteurist visions are all dark crime thrillers, each of which caters to the same basic audience tastes as the others, and therefore don’t really tally as an example of Hollywood diversity—but that’s nitpicky. It’s more interesting to engage with the thrust of his argument, that the post-Star Wars movie culture has crowded out other kinds of films.
Timberg quotes from LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, and it’s worth lingering on part of Hiltzik’s argument: “Ever since then, blockbusters have dominated studio economics and big mainstream movies have gotten stupider… Why be creative when that will merely interfere with merchandising, and when recycling is more dependably profitable?”
In other words—and please feel free to jump in on the comments section if you think I’m misrepresenting this argument, but this is how it sounds to me—once Hollywood got a taste of blockbuster money, they gave up on making a more diverse slate of auteurist or creative films and focused on chasing more blockbuster hits. That the problem lies in the studio’s priorities, that stifle filmmakers’ creativity. If only some brave producer could see something more than money and be willing to bankroll something different!
Well… huh.
I’ll start with the point about how Shirley Temple’s dominance of Hollywood product didn’t completely crowd out other types of films. That’s a fair enough observation, but comparing 1935 to 2015 is problematic. In the 1930s, roughly 65% of the entire US population attended a movie every week. Movies were a default form of mass entertainment, and by default I mean that because people routinely went to the cinema, all a studio really needed to do in terms of advertising was to persuade people who already intended to see a movie to go see theirs instead of a competitor. And because people went to the movies so often, if you as a marketing person failed to convince someone to see your movie over a competitor’s this week, there’s a good chance they’d see yours the next time, and it’d all come out in the wash.
Flash forward to 2015, and less than 10% of the US population sees a film in any given week. That number has been steadily eroding—there was a brief blip upwards in 2012 and thanks to Star Wars: The Force Awakens 2015 will be another bright spot, but in general this is a steady and seemingly irreversible downward trend.
Moreover—today, the average American who actually sees a movie in the theater will see no more than 5 movies all year. Let me clarify—I’m not talking about an average American in general, because 1/3 of the populace doesn’t go see movies at all. Period. Of the remaining 2/3 who do see movies, half of them are unlikely to see more than a handful in the entire year.
What you’re left with is a sliver, 11% of the population, who go see lots of movies. They go several times a month, in fact. They are the lifeblood of the industry. Without them the entire film business would shrivel and die.
And, oh yeah, they are predominantly young people. And many of them are fans of comic books, sci-fi, and other geek culture. And the great thing about these geek culture fans is how easy they are to find—they go to places like Comic-Con and websites like Ain’t It Cool where they are very vocal about their likes and dislikes. They are really easy to market to.
I remember my mother used to complain that Hollywood didn’t make movies for people like her anymore. I pointed out to her that there had been several movies that year aimed at her tastes, and she hadn’t gone to any of them. She replied she’d been busy and she just hadn’t made the time. Meanwhile, I’d seen every single sci-fi action thriller that came out that year, including many I didn’t really like at all. Is it any surprise the machine decided making movies for people like me was a better business decision?
Meanwhile, in the contemporary media culture, pretty much every film will ultimately be available to watch at home on disc or streaming—and that in many cases, the cost of watching the film at home will be comparable to or even less than going to the theater.
Which means you have to spend a lot of money marketing to audiences to convince them to go to the theater in the first place. Today, the cost of marketing a film is roughly equal to the cost of making it in the first place. Inevitably this has an effect on what kinds of movies get made.
How do you convince audiences to go see a movie in the theater? Well, one way is to have a subject that plays better in a theatrical setting. This can mean big action movies full of special effects that call out for IMAX or 3-D. It can also mean subjects that appeal to crowds—say, a raunchy comedy where the jokes play better to a packed house. Or, a subject that has a certain water-cooler aspect, where you want to see it early to avoid spoilers. All of these are aspects that will help convince audiences to make the trek to the theater rather than wait to see it on Netflix. They are also incentives that push filmmakers away from quieter dramas or smaller scale subject matter.
But that implies, wrongly, that quieter dramas or smaller scale subjects aren’t being made, which is untrue. They just aren’t the focus of theatrical feature films. They are, however, the focus of television.
If a storyteller wants to explore character development and nuances of narrative, the open canvas of weekly television is a beckoning playground.
The Man From UNCLE is full of absurd action set-pieces that plays great on a big screen to an audience of whooping adolescents (it was great fun); TV’s The Game gets to spend five times the running length burrowing into its characters and setting. Anchorman 2 plays great in the theater, where it gets to be as crude and loud as it needs to be; Aziz Ansari’s Master of None excels at character building and thoughtful social commentary because it has some six hours with which to work and has no need to try to appeal to everyone.
To me, that’s the main takeaway. There’s a rich and extraordinary diversity of filmed entertainment available now, far more varied than at any point in my lifetime or my understanding of the past.
Not only is there such variety in new entertainment, but so much of the old stuff is available as well. I know I haven’t yet seen every movie ever made—and I’m pretty sure I’ll die before I ever finish that task. I will never run out of things that suit my taste—and no matter how narrow and restrictive your tastes are, I bet you’ll never run out, either.
It’s just that very few of these will play in theaters.