Isaac Chotiner notes the dismal performance of this summer’s blockbuster season and wonders what studios will learn from it:
The most sanguine possibility is that you look over this roster of dreck and decide to make fewer derivative and dumb movies. (Oblivion, After Earth, and Elysium all have a similar plot; White House Down was nearly identical to this spring’s hit Olympus Has Fallen).
Still, it’s easy to imagine Hollywood studios learning precisely the opposite lesson. The problem isn’t derivative movies, the thinking might go; in fact, the most derivative movies sell. Superheroes sell. Enough of these new and risky products like R.I.P.D. and Lone Ranger: just look at where quirkiness gets you. Instead of taking a bet on an original (albeit not very good) movie like Elysium, why not make Grown-Ups 3, even if no one is exactly begging for it? Instead of White House Down, how about paying Robert Downey Jr. an extra $15 million above-and-beyond his already otherwordly salary for another Iron Man? It’s true that every studio needs to keep creating franchises as well as nurturing its existing ones. But who is to say that an extra sequel can’t be made, and that the new projects cannot just be reboots. No, the real lesson of the summer might very well be that audiences want what they already know. Don’t expect much to change.
Alex Mayyasi suggests Hollywood take a page from Silicon Valley’s book:
Despite their similarities … Silicon Valley and Hollywood have similar failure rates for opposite reasons. Silicon Valley doesn’t know what a future success looks like – every investor has a story about passing on a company like Facebook, Google, or Pinterest because it seemed unlikely to succeed or even stupid – so it accepts risk and celebrates it.
Hollywood knows what success usually looks like (it’s a sequel and tends to wear a cape). But pure repetition is not a sure thing (see the recent flop The Lone Ranger – a reboot of a classic story that was also Pirates of the Caribbean retreated as a Western) and it will miss out on surprise hits like Forest Gump.
Catherine Rampell investigates which movies pull in the most money, under the assumption that the answer would be low-budget horror films:
The genre with the biggest box office R.O.I. was actually documentary, with domestic box office
returns averaging 12 times the original production budget, and global returns at nearly 27 times the original budget. Of course, documentaries are generally much cheaper to make than other genres, averaging about $2.6 million in production budget versus $95 million for action films (unadjusted for inflation). So it makes sense that for the small subset of documentaries that do well (remember, these averages include only those films with domestic grosses above $2 million), the R.O.I. can be enormous.
The Dish 