Curiosity Culture

"How bad do these things have to be to properly fail, anyway?"

That's the question Tom Shone asks in his book, Blockbuster. The subject matter is... well, blockbusters, and it covers them from 1975's Jaws to 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It's a laid-back, articulate look at the content of the movies themselves, behind-the-scenes anecdotes about their creators, development, and business strategies, and the changing trends of the industry over the course of three decades. When you get to the end you realize that it's something of a series of chronologically-ordered tangents from a guy who just loves to talk about wonderful movies, but it all flows so smoothly that you don't care. It's definitely worth a read.

The central theme is that summer movie season has changed, and not for the better. We've all had that sensation, right? Mr. Shone grew up with Raiders and Star Wars ("Was there any better time to be young and thrill-hungry and going to the movies?" he asks), and even I, with my meager Independence Day and Men in Black, can sense that today's summer glut has definitely become a case of quantity over quality. Again... lemme just quote the man:

"[Now, there has] risen an entirely new half-breed of film, neither a hit nor a flop, neither popular or unpopular but just there, hanging in the sky like an untethered blimp or derelict space station: semipopular culture, or kind-of popular culture - a culture of semisatiation, geared to the satisfaction of the mildly curious with the not-quite-boring: Curiosity Culture."

That sums up my feelings about as well as can be done. Compared to the movies of the past, today's movies are isolated events. They're out, you're made very aware of that fact, and you might even go see them... but then you never really think about them again. They're like a show that gets canceled in four episodes. What's up with that? With the enormous budgets Hollywood has to throw around and the advances in technology and the art of filmmaking, is there any good reason we shouldn't be getting movies that trounce Raiders and Terminator 2?

If we don't, Mr. Shone argues that, as with every other aspect of life, the reasons are economic. Back in the 70s, 80s, and going into the 90s, movie marketing was not what it is today. People saw a movie due to positive word-of-mouth, so you were under enormous pressure to make a movie impressive enough to make people talk about it to their friends. Consider that. I talked about Green Lantern with my friends on the way out of the theater, but I can't think of a reason to ever talk about it again (And no, right now doesn't count. Do not see Green Lantern.). Summer movies played all summer, as word-of-mouth circulated.

What happened, Mr. Shone says, is that movie studios found a way to “eliminate a certain stratum of failure” from the system, essentially immunizing their pictures from failing to make a profit. With the various steams of revenue available to them (theater, overseas, DVD, Blu-Ray, video-on-demand, television) and a big enough marketing budget, they can ensure that, with an end product sufficiently expensive and flashy, they can drag in enough people over the course of the opening weekend to make their money back. Again, I quote:

“By 1998, what was in place was a system where it is perfectly possible for a studio to buy our curiosity for the space of a single weekend, which was all the time the studio needed to make back its money. It didn't matter whether we liked what we saw or not, only that we sat there, liking it or disliking it, in sufficient numbers... That's all our bum on a seat now meant: the satisfaction of a vague curiosity, and vague curiosity - unlike like or dislike, let alone love - could be bought...”

This also rings true. I have no idea, in retrospect, why I saw Green Lantern. I didn't even go in anticipating a good movie, let alone something on par with, say, Back to the Future. It was... just a movie. That you could go and see. So I did.

Weird.

But anyhow, if a bad movie is going to be as profitable as a good one, then there's less of an incentive to produce a good movie. Surely, all else being equal, studios prefer good movies, but if there's going to be huge profits either way... well, let's not knock ourselves out, eh? The end result is a load of flashy, mediocre movies meandering around the screen every weekend in turn, and me wishing the theater would show Back to the Future.

So let's make a pledge, right here! If Captain America doesn't get legitimately good reviews, then we won't watch it! We'll send a message! We have a nightmarishly staggering buffet of entertainment choices available to us, and we won't settle for anything less than the very best! No more will we see anything with a familiar name on it! From this point forward, I declare this the summer of the legitimately good movie!

Or we can at least buy a ticket to a well-reviewed movie and go into Captain America's theater. Same end effect.

...I'm going to go watch Back to the Future.