3 January 2001 - Page Two

The film business, in the 11 years since Batman, has become more and more about the opening weekend. The movie that builds an audience has become rare. When Miramax pulls the trick with movies like The Cider House Rules or Life Is Beautiful, it is the thing of feature stories. The structure has become simple. Open really wide, hope that you drop 35 percent or less until your movie falls off the face of the screens, deliver the video in time for the next major video window. Of course, there are a lot of highly trained professionals who are making sure that it’s more complicated than that... and it is. But more and more, a movie lives or dies by the opening weekend.

Coincidentally, that has had a direct effect on star salaries, as the ability to open a film has become more and more valuable as that opening-weekend number has become life or death. Going back to the start of this column, fewer than half of the films that ended up with more than $50 million domestic had a major star in the lead. Only 14 "openers" had hits this year. So, now you know why studios are so desperate to build the next big star. A couple of movies with a star on the rise, at a relatively cheap price, can mean tens of millions to a studio’s bottom line. Then again, you have Chris Tucker, who by waiting for the $20 million opportunity, made sure that his career could come to a screeching halt if Rush Hour 2 stiffs while he could have made a $10 million, a $12 million, and a $15 million movie in the 18 months he took off and had less pressure on one film’s success. But that’s a whole different column. As is the effect of foreign box office on star salaries.

My point is that studios have become about the opening weekend and the heart of criticism is about reflection. Reflection is for people with time to spare. A studio opening a movie on 3,000 screens has no time. And so the marketing budgets have replaced word-of-mouth. And what was the value of criticism to the film industry? Well, it was a way of priming the pump for word-of-mouth. But studios started investing $20, $30, and $40 million in advertising and promoting a single movie. The message went right to the consumer. Did they really need the middle man? Meanwhile, the TV outlets were finding that there was only one Siskel & Ebert. Big salaries for full-time, on-air film critics just weren’t good business. They could get a helicopter instead. And the remaining critics and entertainment reporters got less and less insightful as they looked more and more like TV anchors and less and less like movie critics.

And then came the Internet.

There were always discussion groups about movies. I recall the early days of the web, really pre-web, when Roger Ebert was a regular on the discussion boards of Compuserve, advocating the method of discourse above all others. But all that was for early adapters. You had to have a commitment to the conversation if you were going to go through the machinations of board posting. There were also chat rooms on AOL that provided a lot of interesting discussion, but the web would change everything.

Suddenly, with the Imdb, everyone could be a film expert, immersing themselves in every detail of virtually every movie. With fan sites, you could share your intimate obsessions with a few hundred million people (or the few hundred who might congregate on your site to discuss what shirt Guy Pearce wore that day). And then there was Harry Knowles, who followed in the footsteps of Matt Drudge, disregarding every code of conduct and giving voice to the passions of the youth market.

In 1997, Warner Bros.’ Chris Pula gave Harry Knowles credit for affecting the box office of Batman & Robin. Chris now says there was no real bottom-line effect. So does Harry. But the power of the web was announced by an industry that fears the loss of control as much as anything else. In 1999, the New York Times ran a quote about American Beauty that they got off the Imdb from someone named "Anonymous." The New York Times had legitimized an unknown critic who had "reviewed" a movie before its release. Just nine months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an admittedly unscientific poll of Oscar voters, trying for some reason to predict the Oscar results before the Oscars took place.

The door was open. The qualifications of the past, whether they were extensive study of film or a high skill level in writing or even a name that could be held responsible for the thoughts expressed were being devalued as, in many places, they were eliminated outright.

And on the studio side, critics became a simple part of the marketing puzzle. Ironically, the basic rules about embargoing reviews until a film went into release became the excuse for creating a whole subset of critics who would be available for quotes before the official embargo date. Ebert might see a movie weeks before release, but he waits until that Friday to run his review. Well, that doesn’t help the studio open the movie that Friday. Maybe they can get his rave into the Saturday or Sunday print ads, but they need someone singing the film’s praise before that Friday. Critics need to "agree" before "real" critics are even allowed to write about the movie.

Sure, studios would like to have Ebert & Roeper, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Joel Siegel all agree on a movie. But it is just as clear that they perceive the name at the bottom of the quote to be a lot less important than the quote itself. And so suddenly every movie has quotes from "critics" that seem tailor-made to fit the marketing needs of the releasing studio. What a coincidence!!!! But when Ebert & Roeper do chime in, their thumbs now become just another piece of marketing next to Joe Quote Whore from Fox TV in Florida. That’s not Ebert & Roeper’s fault. That’s business, baby.

Meanwhile, on Internet sites across the globe, being first has become more valued than being right or thoughtful. What we on the web forget is that if speed were really the issue, radio would be a more powerful medium than the web. It isn’t, because the permanence of the printed word still resonates. And because the opening of films is so competitive and expensive, any early word is given extra weight.

But if the value of criticism is based on its timing as a marketing tool, then the criticism has lost its inherent value, hasn’t it? That’s the case both for the test-screening reviews of Ain’t It Cool and the quote whores alike, whom it often seems the studios would rather remain anonymous, except for a network or valuable print affiliation. When I make fun of a quote from "The Movie Emporium," I don’t know whether the guy is the second coming of Sarris or a mentally challenged 7-year-old with an electronic crayon. But what I do know is that when the system deviates from its norms, it is more often than not an act of desperation, not inspiration.

 
PAGE THREE: More & 2 ROTDs