Hi, it's Tim. It’s not typically the Done Thing for us members of Team Experience to respond to each other, but Michael C’s Burning Question yesterday got me thinking especially hard, and coupled with Nathaniel’s mention of my own “why did this summer suck so hard?” jeremiad in his link round-up, it seemed impossible not to address what has suddenly become a hot topic: the death of the great American blockbuster, although with Iron Man 3 striding past $400 million, reports of the death of tentpole filmmaking are perhaps exaggerated.
That said, there’s clearly a problem, and as somebody who still hasn’t grown out of the desire to see robots punching explosions into bigger explosions, or what have you, I count myself among the aggrieved that big-budget Hollywood movies have been steadily turning into such paint-by-numbers, flavorless affairs, too finely-tuned for international consumption to have any real personality. But that’s not what I want to talk about – there’s been enough talk about that. I want to talk about the happy flip side of things, which is that for all that the impressive flops and under-performers, it’s hardly been a dolorous wasteland at the multiplex. In fact, I take the story of this summer to be a hopeful one: the future seems to be taking shape right in front of us, and it’s exactly the opposite of the panicked “Cinema is dying!” rants delivered by such men as the Stevens, Soderbergh & Spielberg, recently.
If I were to pick the single most impressive box-office story of the summer, it wouldn’t be Iron Man 3 hitting a figure that is, however large, not that big a deal for a movie with its kind of budget, especially one serving as de facto sequel to a film that destroyed very nearly every record that exists. I’d go with either The Great Gatsby or The Conjuring. [MORE...]
Gatsby was a movie from a famously divisive auteur that met with largely disapproving reviews, which should have been deadly for something as relatively arty as this, and then with a pile of money that absolutely nobody would ever have predicted. The Conjuring is a huge breakout hit in a genre that can usually be predicted with mathematic precision to end up around $60 million, which is already long since surpassed. Neither one of them is perfect (I’m solidly in the camp that found Gatsby a gorgeous failure), but they’re both, after a fashion, the exact sort of film that serious film fans always claim to want: stories about grown-up characters that don’t rest on the lazy crutches of nerd culture and CGI. At the very least, their success (along with The Heat, and Magic Mike last year) clearly indicates that audiences made up of people other than teenage boys are big enough and hungry enough to support movies all by themselves. That’s something studios notice.
Even that isn’t the really exciting part. Say whatever one wants to about the mediocre popcorn movies, but 2013 has been pretty terrific for limited release films: Frances Ha and Before Midnight were greeted with rapturous, “best of the year” reviews, and the equally great Fruitvale Station is newly in its cross-country crawl. And it’s been my experience, at least, that these movies aren’t at all hard to find: the multiplex I’m frequenting right now is a suburban place that tends to load up on the usual suspects – Iron Man 3 on six screens, Star Trek Into Darkness on five, that kind of thing. And yet, this year it’s hosted Spring Breakers, Before Midnight, and Fruitvale Station, all for multi-week engagements: unprecedented bookings all.
So that void that has been causing such strife and agony to the Spielbergs of the world exists; but it’s a void that’s getting filled, by exactly the kind of films that we all clamor for when something like The Lone Ranger comes along to crap things up. The same exact serious dramas for adults that Soderbergh bemoaned as being so impossible to finance just a few months ago are exactly the films that are lining up to take the screens of the disastrous R.I.P.D., and even if we’re never going to return to the days when a film such as The Godfather could become the highest-grossing film of the year, we’re also hardly in the depressing place where The Godfather couldn’t be financed or released theatrically.
Undoubtedly, there’s reason to be concerned that so much big budget filmmaking is bland and unmemorable at best, actively insulting at worst. But that reason isn’t that it’s taking over cinema: the exact opposite, in fact. This summer has been about audiences rejecting junk food and turning towards things that are better, smarter, and more original; it’s a little step towards a day when mature filmmaking takes over again, but it is a step. In the next month, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Short Term 12, and The Grandmaster will all be making themselves available to viewers who know where to look. That doesn’t sound like the death of cinema to me at all. In fact, it sounds like a good reason to be excited.
Why, just look how excited Rooney and Ben are to be a part of it!
Anybody else thinks that the collapse of the blockbuster model is a cause for celebration? Or am I being too optimistic?