Burning Questions: Is the Summer Blockbuster Broken?
Wednesday, July 31, 2013 at 12:01PM
Michael C. in Burning Questions, blockbusters, box office, sequels

Michael C. here to sift through the Doomsday warnings that the Summer box office has provoked. How fitting is it that the story of this Summer’s box office is beginning to resemble one of the disaster movies Hollywood so loves to foist on audiences? 

Seldom does a Summer go by without a high profile flop or two, but these days we can’t get through a weekend without some mega-budget Summer tent-pole crashing and burning. R.I.P.D., White House Down, Lone Ranger, Turbo. One bomb after another. Slate dubbed it the Summer of the Mega-Flop, while the AV Club simply asked “Are Movies Doomed?” These are intelligent, well reasoned articles but in disaster movie terms they are the equivalent of the crackpot scientists prophesying Armageddon, warning everyone to “Look to the heavens! It’s an extinction level event!”

Many blame the crowded media landscape vying for consumer attention. Others point to the recession limiting the disposable cash in consumer pockets. The overall crappiness of the movies themselves hasn’t gone unnoticed either (out of the many underperformers I’d say only Pacific Rim doesn’t richly deserve its fate). The truth involves some mix of all of these factors, but I think the main problem may lay somewhere deeper. I ask you, Is Hollywood’s blockbuster formula fundamentally broken? 


True to the clichés of the disaster genre the studios have cast themselves in the roles of the clueless bureaucrats who are going to ignore the warning signs until it is too late. (“We didn’t listen!”) According to /Film of the two dozen titles already slated for 2015 only two are based original concepts. “Business as usual. Nothing to see here. Ignore the smoldering wreckage strewn through the box office charts.”

Somewhere around the start of the new century the Hollywood Blockbusters pretty much mastered the art of trumping bad word-of-mouth with opening weekend hype. For a while it must’ve seemed like that Holy Grail of movie marketing was in reach: Eliminating that most unpredictable variable, the quality of the movie, from the equation. When even junk like 98’s Godzilla is breaking even you know the hype machine is working like magic. 

The problem with this seemingly bulletproof business model is that the elements assumed to be constants are in fact shifting under their feet. A populace that can spread buzz at the speed of thought on the Internet isn’t going to be nearly as susceptible to saturation marketing as they once were. Special effects no longer guarantee attention-grabbing spectacle once every film can afford them. Trailers crafted to mimic the illusion of a cultural event produce diminishing returns when audiences view them five in a row.

Put simply, when everything is the “Movie Event of the Year”, nothing is.

Things aren’t going to collapse all at once, of course. There is plenty of life in the machine yet. But the cracks are showing and getting worse by the weekend. Yet studios continue to double down on the equation “Presold Property + Big Stars + Fashionable Aesthetic × Mass Marketing Blitz = Gold” as if it were infallible. From the outside it can appear as if human judgment has been all but eliminated from the process. Was there no one to point out that the Lone Ranger brands means nothing to anyone under the age of seventy-five?

I’m not so alarmist to worry that the movies are going away but if Hollywood keeps plugging away like nothing is wrong they risk damaging their most valuable brand: the Summer blockbuster itself. It’s an image was built on memories of Indiana Jones, Batman, Ghostbusters and Roger Rabbit. As Cinemascore can attest, general audiences are very forgiving, but burn them with enough After Earths and who knows what can happen. I know studios hate risk, but they need to remember that it is an essential, and currently absent, part of the formula. There's no way around it.

Then again, I hope the situation does continue in the mold of Hollywood disaster flicks because if big films keep flopping the way they have been soon it will be time for A Plan So Crazy It Just Might Work. The lone voice of reason (Paul Dano should play me) will need to assemble the team of scrappy misfits to save the Summer movie. I picture a slo-mo shot of Darren Aronofsky, Wes Anderson, David Lynch and Steven “pulled out of retirement for one last big job” Soderbergh walking across a studio lot like the cast of The Right Stuff. 

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You can follow Michael C. on Twitter at @SeriousFilm. Or read his blog Serious Film

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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