Well the answer is easy - what happened 20 years ago?
The question is why?
I think it has more to do with Hollywoods moral bankruptcy then anything else.
International sales is just now becoming a factor.
Ender’s Game is slated for winter next year. Anybody that knows sci-fi knows that book is huge, and the movie could possibly make its popularity explode.
Hollywood is so full of blame-America-liberals. They are probably worried that if they hold a big red-carpet premier for a pro-America movie in Hollywood no one would come.
Say what you want about the cheesey movies made in the 80’s. One thing you can’t deny, films like Delta Force were still proudly American...
In many recent movies, those with a plot seem to bomb in the US and explode overseas, Captain America and Thor are two examples. America wants explosions and effects with no thought required.
Hollywood started its downward descent in the aftermath of World War Two when the communists started pushing the ‘film noir’ aesthetic. These were movies that left the viewer leaving the theatre feeling less good than when they entered. ‘Thought provoking’ ‘challenging’ and etc. were all just code words for depressing.
This devolved into the 1970’s movies that I call the “Despair Aesthetic”. Movies of that period were filled with so-called ‘anti-heroes’ that set society on its head as audiences sympathized with the bad guys and then none of these movies ever had a happy ending. Horror movies of this period are notorious for having none of their protagonists alive at the end...a nice vehicle for instilling hopelessness into society.
In the mid 1970’s and early 1980’s some brave film makers went against the communist order of the day and they produced movies that were universally panned by the high brow leftist critics.
‘Star Wars’ early reviews panned the film. ‘Top Gun’ was denounced as jingoistic propaganda. ‘Red Dawn’ was denounced as paranoid and juvenile.
Yet all of them were blockbuster hits that featured people doing honorable things at great personal risk and then the movies had happy endings that left audiences feeling inspired and happy.
The 1990’s brought back an echo of the crap films of the 1970’s only to be slapped down as films like ‘The Patriot’, ‘Gladiator’, and, yes, even ‘Titanic’ brought back stories of individuals doing noble things that left audiences inspired and happy.
Hollywood does not want to make these films and they only allow these films to be made because the BILLIONS that these films earn allow them to keep producing crap.
To a very great extent it is a shame that the blacklist of the 1950’s did not also come with a firing squad to exterminate the Soviet moles who still work in Hollywood.
‘Battleship’ will no doubt be savaged by the leftist critics if it is the patriotic work that it seems to be.
Hollywood is just earning the foreign exchange the U.S. needs to buy oil in the international market.
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that a movie staring an Irishman with an accent that he never gets rid of is “unabashedly patriotic American”. Not to mention the fact that the Battleship movie just looks painfully stupid.
As for if they make movies for American audiences, yeah, most of the tent pole blockbusters are aimed here where the crazy money comes from.
The rather rude awakening that Palin's "Undefeated" or the highly produced "Atlas Shrugged" received suggests that there is no massive "silent majority" of adults who are thirsting for purely conservative messages. However, I have staked a considerable amount of my own money on the fact that this "silent majority" will, if marketed to properly, support "movies Hollywood won't make."
That said, Hollywood also makes clear business decisions based on the fact that most movies will not last in a theater longer than two weeks; and that American theaters are merely advertising vehicles for DVD/VOD sales; and that American sales are mostly dollar-setters for the overseas market. Example: "The Expendables," which had terrible reviews and ok domestic dollars, was already profitable based on foreign pre-orders because of Stallone, Jet Li, and Statham.
The other two staggering realities of Hollywood is that someone with a digital cam and a good home editing system can "make" a quality movie for a tiny fraction of what anything other than a special effects blockbuster would cost. This has introduced waves of new competition. And finally, the explosion of hand-held video devices means that things other than movies compete for even teenagers' limited time, and therefore only the very biggest blockbusters can recoup at the gate initially.
Foreign grosses became the predominant factor in Hollywood profits about twenty years ago. The need to appeal to the international market drives a lot of decisions that otherwise seem hard to explain.
Movies are made in Mexico and Canada to cut costs.....UNIONS plus over paid actors.....imho
“I think it has more to do with Hollywoods moral bankruptcy then anything else.”
Well that’s certainly part of it, but there’s a large measure of value-neutral business calculation operating here as well.
The global market dwarfs our domestic market and movie makers are targeting that audience and not us. So America-specific themes get rejected.
It’s similar to what’s led to outsourcing and the wholesale transfer of manufacturing to China. The world changed dramatically when the USSR collapsed in 1989 and the old Communist bloc joined the world economy. The developing Third World economies began their explosive growth as well.
The ‘Boomers grew up in a world where the American market was the largest market in the world. American located businesses employed Americans and targeted their products to the American market. Large firms even had specific ties to individual cities.
Well that world and that economy is gone. What we once thought of as ‘American’ corporations went from having a national focus with some international sales, to being multinational with a global focus. Most would likely defer from being described as ‘American’ firms at this point. Their market is global, their workforce is global. So the product they make becomes less and less distinctively American. This is true in Hollywood as well, but it’s probably more just more visible to us.
Maybe Star Trek.
The international market has definitely became an even bigger factor than it was in the last few years. And not just on the films you might expect. Look how huge Mamma Mia was overseas. Foreign grosses used to be expected to about match domestic grosses on a Hollywood blockbuster. Now I would say they inching closer to averaging 50% more than domestic.
U.S. ticket sales seem to be declining, no doubt because of the huge price increases in the last year or two which came at the worst possible time, when our economy is cratering.
There also seems to be a little boredom setting in for superhero movies and CGI cartoons, which used to be reliably massive grossers here but have been declining. But foreigners are still eating up those types of films and seem to be much less picky about quality. Spider-Man 3 was panned here and grossed much more poorly than the other two, but it was the most popular of the series overseas.
Unfortunately if you look around at other markets, EVERYTHING’S doing better overseas. The U.S. economy SUCKS right now. That cannot be understated. There is NO growth potential here in just about any market, but lots of it overseas.
There hasn’t been a gerat movie in a very long time. We used to buy lots of them but in the past few years we haven’t bough but a handful and they were terrible.
Gran Torino is about the only good Hollywood film I’ve seen come out in the past several years.
Well the answer is easy - what happened 20 years ago?
There is a book out about the hypcocricy of the Entertainment industry.
Hollywood Hypocrites.
It details just how the liberals work to get around Unions and taxes.