CHANGING LANDSCAPE – 10/27/09
PRECIOUS BACKLASH – I am already feeling the urge to lash back at the talk of backlash.
It is the profound arrogance of the entertainment media to delude ourselves that we, not the real movie goers or even the privileged awards voters, decide what should be praised and how intensely. It is the same pathetic mindset that happens when Variety pans a movie like The Road or AntiChrist and other media monkeys line up to suggest that this is a meaningful moment in the history of the film and future audience reaction.
There can be no backlash against Precious because, so far, the entire definition of how the movie plays has been based on a breathless media and Oprah… not necessarily in that order.
Some fools are even wondering aloud whether Lee Daniels is costing himself a Best Director win by being honest in public… when he is a long ways away from getting a nomination, much less a win. (This is true of all the filmmakers in play, not just him.)
STOP!!!! Get some perspective. And stop damaging a movie like Precious by treating it, months before the response to the movie from real people and real voters will be heard, like the Holy Grail.
You know why Up In The Air has gone quiet lately? Because the folks at Paramount marketing get the joke. It’s hard to live up to the endless, screaming hype. Plus it turns a pulpy picture like Precious and really, a smoother-edged pulpy picture like Up In The Air into something an audience has to do… to cross off its list of responsibilities… and disallows the honest discovery of the film.
For me, this goes back to Brokeback Mountain, which actually may have won had so many not assumed that it was a mortal lock to win and that any other result was backlash. This just wasn’t the case. The love for the film, once people saw it, was not universal. Not close. But worse, the positioning of inevitability emboldened Oscar voters who didn’t love the film to feel even more strongly about not loving it. They wanted to kill the hype… the finger-waving “I’m not going” of it all, not the movie.
You can’t tell people, “And you… and you… and you… you’re gonna love me.” You have to let them love you. And that is exactly, by the way, what Dreamgirls says at the end of that song, when the show immediately goes on without Effie.
Let me also point out… the overwrought screeching around this film is not coming from Lionsgate. It’s the media… really a few loud voices. This is not to discount the many people who have seen and love the film or the audience awards. But this is not a film that can march up to the Kodak and demand its Oscar. This is a year of many colors and we are a long way from a frontrunner.
Calm down and let’s get on without talk of frontrunners or backlashes until they are more than a figment of our prideful imaginations.
SOUPY & STERN – I had a thought sitting at the back of my head and finally got to look into whether I was having an aneurysm… I wasn’t. Soupy Sales was Howard Stern’s radio lead-in at WNBC when Stern rose to national fame/infamy and eventually got fired in a flash in September 1985.
When Stern got dumped – I happened to be working in the building at the time – the first rumor was that Sales was behind having him fired. But it wasn’t true. Stern had very crudely attacked the lead anchor of the lead money-making news show on WNBC-TV, which was also in the same building. She was the straw that broke management’s back on Stern.
But remembering back to those days, it amused me to remember that Soupy was still working in the big leagues then and leading into the dark side of modern radio.
SNL KAGAN’S LATEST SILLY STUDY RESULT – I don’t have the study in front of me, so I can’t deconstruct the details, but good gosh a’mighty, this “expensive movies are more profitable than small movies” headline is a load of excrement of monumental proportion.
Why?
First, the geniuses didn’t factor in marketing costs – which have been the fastest growing cost for theatrical distribution for the last decade, until the last year or so – or foreign box office – which is greater in most studio release cases than domestic – or DVD revenues.
Really? A grown up analyst is analyzing profits and losses based on 35% or less of the revenue stream and distribution costs that are often greater than the cost of production and on the over-$100m titles represent no less than $100m worldwide?
Idiocy.
All a smart person has to do is to read the lead of Variety’s story on the study – “Films boasting production pricetags of more than $100 million actually generate higher returns than mid-range pics, averaging $247 million in net profits per release.”
Seriously. That has to be a typo, right?
Of the Top 30 grossers of 2009 so far, the total domestic gross is $3.127 billion… or an average domestic gross of $184 million. Generously estimating that this represents only 40% of the theatrical gross (foreign, 60%), means an average $460 million gross worldwide. That’s a rental return to the distributor of $253 million. Let’s be even more generous and estimate an additional $150 million NET in post-theatrical revenue.
So we’re at $400 million. Minimum production and distribution cost… $200 million. Realistic but still generous average cost… $275 million. About half of these high-cost titles carry heavy percentage players… but to be generous again, let’s cut it down to 5% of net going out the door to participants. That’s another $20 million.
So… even under this generous and mostly unrealistic scenerio, you’re looking at a $100 million+ cost movie being $105 million into profit.
But what’s the real truth. Three movies will make significantly more profit than $105 million. And five of the movies will lose money. That leaves nine films somewhere in the middle.
And this doesn’t include Land of The Lost or Where The Wild Things Are in this year’s numbers, as neither has gone Top 30 yet. (WTWTA should get there.)
Yes, making The Dark Knight or Transformers 2 or Harry Potter is a better business than making The Proposal or Paul Blart: Mall Cop. But franchise chasing can shut down studios…or at least, get a lot of people fired. In the last decade, no $40 million movie got any major (or even any Dependent) in trouble.
But if you want to know the real truth, simply look at how the business itself has changed. Studios have gotten as far away as possible from funding all but a handful of franchise movies on their own. If there is all this profit in making expensive movies, how come no one other than rich ambitious outsiders are wanting to put the money on the line?
RICKY GERVAIS HOSTS GOLDEN GLOBES – Great for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association… and a completely wrong-headed idea for The Oscars. Equally stoopid, the notion that Neil Patrick Harris should complete the triple crown by adding Oscar hosting duties to the Tonys (great performance) and the Emmys (not so great). The Emmys were easily the worst televised awards show of the year this year. Very little worked… and it was trying so hard that it bordered on Stephen Fetchit.
I love Gervais. But he has a very specific kind of humor. And it is so distinctly not an Oscar kind of humor.
Truth is, Billy Crystal is a middlebrow funnyman. He’s never going to demand much more from the audience than they are going to be happy to give up from their couches. And that is why he is so well remembered as an Oscar host.
The same is true of Jay Leno. He gave up being edgy, which he once was (a bit), to become Middle America’s funny man. And he did it brilliantly. Would I trade an hour of Leno for 15 minutes of Lewis Black? No. 20 minutes of Letterman? No. But I am not the guy’s core audience. Oscar’s TV audiences ARE his core audience. (Note; I do find Leno funny… but it is just a soft kind of funny… every once in a while, he let’s something tough slip in and I remember just how funny he really can be.)
This is what happens when there’s nothing to talk about, people start looking for an angle and inventing controversy.
However, putting aside for a minute what Academy voters will think of Precious, how do you think it’ll go over with audiences outside of the festival circuit? Even with Oprah support it seems like a tough sell to me. That’s not to say that people who see it won’t like it, but getting people there seems like an uphill battle.
Am I just completely missing the boat on this thing?
Precious will gross between $40m and $85 million. The majority of tickets will be sold in the black community (about $35m – $45m), though the slow release could lead to some pushback in that community. The white audience is much more complicated and getting the gross over $10m – $15m with that audience is going to be very tough.
It will sold as uplifting.
It will receive between 2 and 5 Oscar nominations, depending on how things go.
On the eve of the overhyped/overbooked Michael Jackson picture, Sony whines and cries “we can’t make more movies because of piracy“. Pot Kettle Black.
Go look at all the TV commercials, print ads and trailers for this year’s releases. All the name-checking, all the Academy Award pimping, all the Legion of Doom stuff. What that does is tell the public “we make this stuff for ourselves and our cronies”.
Put more effort into storytelling and believability, less into hype and B.S. The public will follow along.
What a silly article by Variety. Look no further than “The Proposal’s” debut on DVD this week. The film raked in around $39.2 million in opening week sales, only 1 million behind “Wolverine!”
Piracy? Maybe in China but most people can’t figure out how to pirate movies.
Saw Precious and it was okay, nothing earth shattering. I felt some of the more harrowing scenes were exploitive in the explicitness.
Is the thing with Monique skipping all publicity for this thing and screwing herself out of an Oscar nomination getting any mainstream traction?
David, if you live in the hood. You sure as shit do not want to see Precious. Precious is all over the place. If anything. I could see the film selling to the white folks that have no clue, that this country could have someone like Precious in it. Hopefully it opens their fucking eyes long enough to make them realize something.
Okay, stupid of me as always but…
Chucky, what’s the ‘Legion of Doom’? Are they spying on you via your fillings?
Also, I’m curious to know what, if any, movies you think count as ‘believeable storytelling’ since you only seem to mention titles when you hate them (I mean, when you haven’t seen them but hate their ad campaigns).
I never had much true “belief” that Oprah sells things people may not be into until I saw her adding “The Road” to her book club. That made the book SKYROCKET and people loved it. “Precious” is much the same way. Verrrry difficult subject and the film is like a frigging horror film. I think it’ll play well with audiences even though it’s brutal.
And I totally concur with your rant about people already lining up against it, David. It played at Austin Film Fest last week (where I saw it) and the immediate reaction from peers was “Oh, that is/isn’t an Oscar lock.” Why does that need to be the #1 criteria for a movie?? Why can’t it just find it’s way??
Granted, the massive amounts of money Oprah and Tyler Perry can (and will) throw at it to MAKE it an Oscar contender further warps the end product, it’s still a really good movie that should be allowed to stand on it’s own.
From Ryan….
“Dave,
I spent five minutes trying to post this on the HotBlog, and it wasn’t going so well, so here goes-feel free to post it and respond if you can get it to work :
“STOP!!!! Get some perspective. And stop damaging a movie like Precious by treating it, months before the response to the movie from real people and real voters will be heard, like the Holy Grail. ”
You’re making the argument that the American public is affected by what journalists, like you, are saying about a movie like ‘Precious’. I’ll grant you the point that public perception is changed about a movie in some instances by what journalists say. But look at Rotten Tomatoes for the top-ten box office movies for this year, and then argue that the American public gives a crap about what any journalists are saying about a movie. Still making the argument? Then, think about the fact that this movie is carrying the ‘Oprah brand’, and the ‘Tyler Perry’ brand. This movie seems pretty critic proof to me!
I would argue that Precious’ is gonna be successful, based on both brands, and it has nothing to do with what the media is saying. Can we agree that Oprah has the housewives hooked with anything she is selling (no offense to housewives, but the Oprah Book Club has proved that this is true!)? And if we can agree on that, can we move to the point that those housewives aren’t going to be thinking “The media is over-selling that ‘Precious’ movie….I’m not gonna go because of that!”.
If Oprah and Perry weren’t involved, that movie goes into From Ryan….
“Dave,
I spent five minutes trying to post this on the HotBlog, and it wasn’t going so well, so here goes-feel free to post it and respond if you can get it to work :
“STOP!!!! Get some perspective. And stop damaging a movie like Precious by treating it, months before the response to the movie from real people and real voters will be heard, like the Holy Grail. ”
You’re making the argument that the American public is affected by what journalists, like you, are saying about a movie like ‘Precious’. I’ll grant you the point that public perception is changed about a movie in some instances by what journalists say. But look at Rotten Tomatoes for the top-ten box office movies for this year, and then argue that the American public gives a crap about what any journalists are saying about a movie. Still making the argument? Then, think about the fact that this movie is carrying the ‘Oprah brand’, and the ‘Tyler Perry’ brand. This movie seems pretty critic proof to me!
I would argue that Precious’ is gonna be successful, based on both brands, and it has nothing to do with what the media is saying. Can we agree that Oprah has the housewives hooked with anything she is selling (no offense to housewives, but the Oprah Book Club has proved that this is true!)? And if we can agree on that, can we move to the point that those housewives aren’t going to be thinking “The media is over-selling that ‘Precious’ movie….I’m not gonna go because of that!”.
If Oprah and Perry weren’t involved, that movie goes into <100 theaters, and dies (and possibly goes direct to video). I agree with you that a movie can be killed by people talking it up like it's the next 'Citizen Kane' (and then it fails to live up to that), but I don't think that 'Precious' qualifies because it already has a built-in audience.
"Calm down and let's get on without talk of frontrunners or backlashes until they are more than a figment of our prideful imaginations."
Stupid media! Why would they ever want to run a "20 weeks of Oscar" column that ranks frontrunners and possible backlashes, every week, for almost half the year!!!!! Who would do such a thing? đ
"It is the profound arrogance of the entertainment media to delude ourselves that we, not the real movie goers or even the privileged awards voters, decide what should be praised and how intensely."
So is it 'profound arrogance' for you to accept money from studios for the Oscar advertising that you do on your website (especially if you don't even like the movies that they're advertising for)? Is it 'profoundly arrogant' for you to review a movie, if it convinces someone who might actually like said movie, to not see it? Where's the ethical line for a critic?"
If you are a film critic, a fair degree of arrogance comes with the territory. Seriously. You have to think your comments are worth reading and considering. And — though this is becoming increasingly rare — worth getting paid for.
Back in the real world we see that “Avatar” looks like a major league rip-off.
Thx for information.