The great William Goldman coined the phrase “nobody knows anything” in his 1983 classic, Adventures in the Screen Trade. (The one true “must read” for industry insight.) This summer seems to be out to prove his point in a big way. There are plenty of people who loved last summer’s The Lost World, but most people would call it a dog. Yet, last summer, it opened with $92.7 million over Memorial Day weekend. This year, Godzilla was knocked from mega status to being just another blockbuster in just the two days between its Tuesday night sneaks and Memorial Day Friday.
So, what lesson did we take from that lambasting? Too Much Hype Is Bad.
That must have been it, right? Backlash.
Screen Your Movie.Godzilla wasn’t ready for an audience until five days before release. No time for the Sony marketing team to take the audience reaction to the new animalistic Godzilla into account. If they had found that core viewers were going to react to the beast as though they had been doused with radiation by Devlin and Emmerich, they would have adjusted marketing, right?
Make A Great Movie. This is an old rule, but a good one. The Centropolis guys thought they had made a qualifying film. But the core audience responded with venom. Regular audiences seemed to like it all right, though most people concede that the human story was lame. Not so much bad as soft.
Of course, that didn’t stop Twister from racking up $242 million domestically. Though Twister had effects we hadn’t seen before (Another rule: Use Never-Before-Seen Effects), and their sidekick characters were kind of cool.
So, another rule: Use Iconic Characters, At Least As Sidekicks. And a problem for Godzilla. People felt they had seen the effects before in the Jurassic Park movies.
OK. Got it. Wrote it down. We’re prepared.
And then came the Armageddon. Disney pulled back on the hype, screened the movie for critics and junket jockeys (and some invited geek types whom the studio expected to juice the room), and they used iconic characters. In fact, they used characters so iconic that each sidekick had their own little music video about their life away from the oil/asteroid rig. But two little problems. Armageddon featured the fourth major CG (computer graphic) destruction of New York (after ID4, Godzilla and Deep Impact. What do these guys have against The Chrysler Building, anyway?) Broke that rule. And was this a Great Movie? Well, no. Personally, I consider it a soulless exercise in trying to remake Con Air in space without the weight of Nicolas Cage and with the asteroid in John Malkovich‘s role. Malkovich could sneer that asteroid into submission. But there are those of you who disagree. I certainly have to acknowledge that. But cries of “Lighten Up! It’s only an effects movie!” leave us with a real problem. I was saying just that about Godzilla. And there was plenty of mail from those who agreed with me on that picture. (My simple comparison. I thought that Godzilla was a sincere effort and that Armageddon was, as I just said, completely calculating.)
So, making a great movie isn’t the answer. Too hard to decide what that is unless you are working with Speilberg, Lucas, Cameron or Zemeckis. Then you’re safe. Audiences will always give them the benefit of the doubt! That is, unless you are trying to sell 1941, Radioland Murders, The Abyss or Death Becomes Her. Damn it! (And I really like three of those four movies.)
Could it be that coughing up the latest effects, not technology-wise but in content, is the requirement for a mega-movie now? Men in Black gave us some new alien stuff last year. That worked. But Starship Troopers had the incredible cutting-edge bugs that we hadn’t seen before and it flopped. So, effects are not enough.
But Starship Troopers wasn’t a summer movie. Maybe it should have been. And thank God Titanic wasn’t. You all know that I am not a lusty Titanic lover, but I have always said that it was a must-see-in-a-big-theater movie. The last hour is awesome. And Titanic had some great effects (though we’re going to be laughing at that overhead deck shot, with the cardboard-like CG people, in the near future). Do you smell a new rule?
Brand New Effects Plus Characters People Love Means Mega Dollars. Good! We have an answer! Finally.
But what if Titanic had made its July release date? Would it have been nearly the smash we now have in the record books? Probably not. Remember, Titanic only opened with $28 million. In the summer, that would be considered a disastrous opening. But fortunately for the Big Boat and The King Of The World, the rest of the Christmas line-up was pretty soft. And the winter schedules featured dud after dud. Titanic captured America’s imagination and sailed in smooth water for months. When it finally lost the No. 1 slot, it wasn’t due to the competition. It was simply slowing down on its own and a decent competitor finally showed up. So throw everything out! Titanic means nothing to a distribution chief trying to figure out how to navigate summer. There is never any clear water, until maybe August, but then you are limiting yourself to a three-week summer run. No one wants to get too close to the Labor Day wall.
Have you noticed yet that I have no real answers here?
Saying “Make A Great Movie” just isn’t enough. Independence Day played the patriotism card at just the right moment. Effects were good, but the best effect was the coming-of-age of Will Smith. Forrest Gump and The Lion King, the only other summer films to gross more than $300 million since Jurassic Park, changed the effects equation, as they were also low-tech phenomena. Both captured us in a way no one expected. (The Lion King did almost $100 million more than Disney’s No. 2 animated classic, Aladdin). So the effects rules aren’t enough. Iconic characters can be taken either as fun or as a trick. One never knows. Hype worked last summer with Men in Black, so that can’t be the problem. Maybe there is just no way to raise the hype envelope any higher. Just like there’s no way to do a realistic Godzilla creature that doesn’t remind people of Jurassic Park. Or maybe the reality that theatrical showings of a movie are just one small part of the viewership has finally caught up with the movies. Maybe we are at a moment in history when the $200 million gross is the high watermark, with only remarkable exceptions like Titanic, and audiences are ready for day-‘n-date PPV premieres.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Nobody knows anything. But there are a bunch of guys in $3,000 suits trying to figure it out before they get fired. Me? I’m in my T-shirt and shorts, enjoying the weather and waiting for the next epiphany. Maybe Lethal Weapon 4 will put it all into perspective. Or Lethal Weapon 14.
READER OF THE DAY: Marianne T wrote: “What’s going on here is Titanic — great story, simple story, charismatic acting, and interacting, huge scope, comprehensible scope, incredible quality throughout. However hard it was to be a part of or to make, what comes through the screen is magic. Having felt that magic, the engineered, veneered disasters seem doubly preposterous. The direction of disaster-type movies will have to become graspable, not almost laughable. Was there an instant in Deep Impact, Godzilla or Armageddon where anybody in the audience really cared? I think not. Perhaps we now have the capacity to sit in a theater and get involved for more than two hours INSTEAD of tuning out or numbing out. The huge scale is not the problem. These movies are not too big, or loud, or filled with too many people. Titanic was all of those, and yet it seems to have awakened a collective memory of why we go to the movies (and maybe why they are made). What’s now missing is something as gossamer as film itself. Having been ‘grabbed’ by it in Titanic and most recently in Out of Sight I know it exists. It’s, I don’t know, it’s magic!”

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