It seems I’m not the only one to have noticed a distinct cooling of public interest in blockbuster movies, The Guardian has an article looking at why this year’s ‘must-sees’ didn’t hit home as they have in years gone by. The Island, one of the biggies this summer, directed by Michael Bay and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, a team with an excellent track record, was considered a sure-fire hit, but made barely $12m on its opening weekend in the States.
Many people are quoted in the article with their reasons for the worst period in US box office history since 1985. One of the main concerns seems to be DVDs, and more specifically, the narrowing gap between the cinema and DVD releases. They quote Spielberg and Ridley Scott as saying there are simply too many big movies and that the flooded market has taken the shine off of these grand projects. Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven only managed $130m, while Spielberg and Lucas shot past the $200m mark with War of the Worlds and Revenge of the Sith respectively. Add Batman Begins to the big boys and even the president of 20th Century Fox thinks the whole ‘the sky is falling’ thing is over-hyped.
As I’ve pointed out in previous articles, the movie business doesn’t rely on box office for it’s profits, so it really doesn’t care too much, cinema is just a launching platform. Besides, I don’t think there will ever not be a demand for cinemas, it’s all just a bunch of hot air. Hollywood has gone through a series of crises over the years and always come out on top, I don’t think this’ll be any different.
In fact, I have my own view on why fewer people seem to be making it to the cinema: less cinematic events. Look at most of the films that were out this year, only those with a really grandiose vision managed to pull in a crowd. The navel-gazing films that have been gaining ground of late are all well and good, but they don’t draw people out of the house, they work just as well on a TV screen as a cinema screen, what we need is more big-vision stuff. What you want is something with some majesty to it, mixed in with some star power, a quality story and interesting characters and, voila, the audience will return. At the moment we’re beseiged by quiet, introspective pieces and video games with real people.
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