Posted on 07/24/2003 9:40:04 AM PDT by kattracks
Tinseltown bigwigs are in a tizzy that the American public is no longer lapping up whatever slop they dish out, and they're finally realizing that the Internet is one cause of their well-deserved woes.
People attending advance screenings are inundating the Internet with their reviews and exposing such duds as "The Hulk," "Hollywood Homicide," "The In-Laws," "Alex and Emma" and the sequels to "Legally Blonde," "Dumb and Dumber" and "Charlie's Angels."
Positive word of mouth has boosted "Finding Nemo" and good low-budget movies not touted by the Hollywood hype machine: "28 Days Later," "Bend It Like Beckham" and "Whale Rider," the Christian Science Monitor reported today.
"Hollywood is pulling its hair out trying to figure out how to market its movies amidst the new world of Internet buzz," said Anthony Kusich, analyst for Reel Source Inc., a box-office tracking company.
"First-time viewers are having much more say in which movies make it and which ones don't, creating potential audiences for stuff they like and killing off audiences for stuff they don't."
Coming up: "Gigli," starring the media-saturated Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, is being greeted with catcalls, while "Seabiscuit," based on Laura Hillenbrand's outstanding best seller, is generating positive buzz.
The box office has fallen 3 to 4 percent from last year, the Monitor reported. Second-week attendance has plunged especially steeply as people who failed to heed advance word of mouth and unwittingly paid to see terrible movies quickly told their friends to stay home.
Another factor: Many Americans are fed up with and boycotting Hollywood's inane self-appointed political "experts."
What'd Gandalf do between sets?
"There are actors with liberal stances..."
True but they arent the ones fronting the money to buy the story and make the movie. If the movie was made by someone else and then purchased by a big company, the actors arent the ones offering to buy it. Its not the idiot actors in the film causing the agenda problem, its the writers and those further up the corporate chain who buy the stories/movies that cause the agenda problem.
"it all comes down to profit"
Lets be blunt. Profit: As CEO I see that liberal agenda/titty movies are failing and "conservative"/historical based/family movies are soaring. I shut off the money spigot to the first and open the second. Now I can retire.
"and the mass market"
Even the biggest idiot wandering the street, though they may not be able to express it clearly, is leery after having been "Blair-Witched". The more hype there is by a studio, the worse the movie probably is. Stop trying to make the money through "mass marketing" and start with that old fashioned concept of quality.
"The failed blockbusters listed in the article didn't fail because of their agenda"
Maybe youre right. Maybe many of us just recognized over-hyped crap with no story line.
"Legally Blonde II is a big hit"
Is it a big hit compared to box office sale blockbusters or is it just the best of the crap that some people are still paying for?
In addition to Seabiscuit, mentioned in the article, there's an incredible buzz regarding The Passion.
There's a new thread on FR about this movie nearly every day, and it won't release until Easter. There are general movie fan sites, neither conservative nor liberal, neither Christian on non-... just movie lovers... where the excitement about The Passion is at the same level you see on the FR threads.
For one thing, you may have noticed at least during the past year the banners on his site have been devoted exclusively to New Line releases. And as TheFacer.net pointed out, every single review of a New Line film written by Harry has been positive.
So his assertion of not being bought and paid for my movie studios as many other gurus of sites like his are is just flat ludicrous.
But was HW trying to sell movies to Russians or Americans? It seems to me that I remember hearing that Americans generally had more disposable income?
Hollywood won't "produce" better films but they may follow the trail of internet buzz to locate some good foreign or independent films to they could give wider distribution.
Unfortunately, some it just leads them to produce an American "remake" which may or may not capture the spirit of the original (but why even remake a recent movie???).
Some recent imports/remakes include Ring, Spirited Away , Bend It Like Beckham, 28 Days Later, and the upcoming Shaolin Soccer.
They may not all be "big" films, but they can compete against Hollywood's product in the non-art theaters. They at least offer some change of pace from the Hollywood formula.
Red Dawn was a great movie. Unfortunately, you had to know a little history and understand the implications of current events in order to realize how good it was. It was trashed before it hit the screens as "red-baiting" tripe by the usual suspects, though it was nothing of the sort.
The movie suffered from a well organized effort to convince people not to see it. The same thing happened to "The Beast", a very well-made, well-acted and authentic movie about the Soviets in Afghanistan. They were both anti-Soviet, and in the 80's, the left couldn't allow that, especially at the movies.
I'm sure neither of us want to know.
The knothead blathered on and on about how this (LOTR) was proof that gay men could be good in dramatic roles, yada, yada, as if no gay men had ever done so before ! Had someone mentioned as an aside that he was homosexual, my response would have been "so what". But when he shoves it in our faces on television and in print, it becomes an issue. "So what" becomes "yuck".
Similarly the political issues. When I hear the name Barbara Streisand, I don't think "actress" or "singer", I think "hypocritical communist radical".
Red Dawn grossed nearly $36M in the US:
http://us.imdb.com/Business?0087985
I wasn't able to find an authorative reference to the cost of production, but several reports put it at 8.5M. From what I remember, it wasn't exactly a high-cost production.
That's hardly a flop.
It could be an action film or a suspense film.
After "Columbine" I don't think that the studios are anxious to make a movie about high school kids using firearms (especially in a positive manner).
There is a different type of movie about youth violence from Japan called Battle Royale (it is an alternate present-near future piece of fiction). It's played the rest of the world but may be a long time before it gets released in America (again Columbine would seem to be the reason). That the film would be "outside" of the age range of most high school students does not matter, Hollywood knows that minors see R rated films all the time (and NC-17 films probably aren't hard to acquire either).
So the question remains -- why do they persist in producing unprofitable crap?
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