 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| |||||
Week Of May 15, 2006 - Premature Week - Oscar Mon / Wed / Fri
May 19, 2006
Premature Week
THE SUMMER OF RAGE
I am not very happy with the way things are going this summer and the disappointment that is at the theaters is really a small part of it. There are bad movies all the time. And then better movies. It happens. But I think we are in a cycle of media vs. the studios that is likely to effect the way we all work together for a long time to come. There are small shifts all the time, but it seems like this is a paradigm shift.
Neither side is all to blame. It seems that we are in the presence of a perfect storm and the damage could be permanent.
On the media side, you have the combination of a threatened traditional media, online media in its precocious childhood, and paid media scrambling to secure both a spreading audience and high advertising rates.
On the studio side, you have insanely outbalanced advertising costs, production budgets that are stinking of desperation instead of much needed moderation, a focus on opening weekend that is getting worse even as people are theorizing about day-n-date releasing that would increase the intensity on opening even more, and an annual ratcheting up in the anxiety about controlling a media that is meant to be free.
The last few weeks have been a remarkable frenzy of fear, rage, self-righteous retribution, and self-righteous control that has made for an ugly, ugly time for the entire industry. In this fight, there are no winners on the media side. No one is doing any better than treading water. There are the Entertainment Tonights of the world where the treading is in warm, comfy water. But how long before ET is threatened by people's ability to choose their celebrity news on the web? There is no moving forward there.
And, as a result, it seems that media is convinced that it is better off to engage in mutual assured destruction… as in, "You studio assholes have been lording it over us all this time and we licked your backsides, but are in the most insecure media job market in decades while you drive around your Hummers and pay lip service to environmentalism and complain when your second maid is sick and worry about paying for your next $20,000 vacation and if kissing your asses isn't going to help us secure our positions and we see people getting famous (if relatively poor) by selling mean spirited gossip on the web, guess where we are going?"
It's worse if you are Tom Cruise.
And that doesn't even require me to defend or embrace Cruise… just to have some perspective on the intensity of the mean spirited coverage.
And let's say for a second that his entire life is a sham… and I am not saying it is… I am trying to make a point. So let's say it is all a fake…
Shouldn't we, as human beings, be feeling sympathy for someone who is a desperate as that - were it true - would suggest that individual is?
Shouldn't we feel some pain or at least sympathy for a human being who doesn't feel that they can share their deepest truths with the world?
And what if we don't believe in Scientology… isn't there someone living within a block of you who has strongly different feelings about religion than you and don't you respect their right to express their beliefs as they like, even if you disagree?
I know… don't want to think about it like that. It's more than just throwing shit.
Back to the non-hypothetical…
What creates the viciousness around Tom Cruise is not that he is so bad or so different. What creates the viciousness is that we like tearing down those we see as more powerful than ourselves. And yes, he may create the problem for himself given the context of the situation. But hey… aren't we adults? Aren't we responsible for our own actions? Is kicking someone when we perceive them to be vulnerable any different, really, if the kickee is an animal or a movie star with hundreds of millions of dollars?
But let's move away from personalities. Let's look at the Mission: Impossible III, Poseidon, Da Vinci Code cycle. Is the shit that is being kicked out of these three movies proportional to, a) the movies, b) the significance of their financial downside to their studios, conglomerates, or even to what might be the real numbers we won't know for months, or c) their place in our society?
I would say no, no, and no.
And I disliked all three movies.
This is how I see the cycle. It started a few months ago as Paramount and Sony started to create and manage the hype on M:I3 and Da Vinci Code. The missions were very different. Paramount was looking to rebuild the reputation that Tom Cruise had damaged last year, but while showing enormous respect to Mr. Cruise. They also had a movie to sell. Expectations were enormous, since the box office for the series had stepped up from the first film to the second. And even though Cruise had delivered in a major way last summer with War of the Worlds - yes, with Steven Spielberg - there was a sense of the film underperforming in America ($234 million domestic and $357 million internationally, #4 for the year in both categories).
And here's the big problem. You want hype, you're setting yourself up for backlash. The more hype, the more backlash. And Cruise, for two decades now, has been a master of hype. He has survived Schwarzenegger and Travolta and Hanks and Smith and Roberts and every hopeful trying to shove him off his perch. His success has not precluded theirs. But those who have been the most successful, at least financially, have all also been great self-promoters.
What Cruise didn't do this year - and who are we to say he had to? - was to apologize. And so, as he went about his business as though last summer had never happened, the stage was set for him to pay for his sin… the sin of not serving the feelings of the media.
Of course, there is a flip side. Cruise is manipulating the press into selling his movie and his image to the world. The media is a part of that process and the best marketing that money can't buy… at least in theory.
But unlike advertising, where the studios (and in Cruise's case, the talent) control the message, the media can be a double-edged sword. It all seems so innocent until someone loses an arm. People can guess, but no one knows for sure at just what moment the friendly media teddy bear is going to turn into a raging Gremlin or just what is going to set us off.
Would the media jihad against Tom Cruise and his "disastrous" $47 million opening have been less vicious if the film hadn't been at Tribeca, if he had not traveled New York on a day long hype marathon, if he didn't have his first born child in the midst of the press junket? I don't know.
By now, some of you are aching to tell me that I am overstating how tough the press was and that Cruise earned everything he got. So let me distinguish again… there is a difference between drinking the studio Kool-Aid, reporting aggressively, and slaughtering your subject as though he/they/it was/were trying to clone Adolph Hitler. What has happened this year, so far, is a repeated shift between Kool-Aid and Hitler with little in between.
On The Da Vinci Code, the situation was completely different than M:I3. There was a sense that the media was giving the movie a pass, putting their weight behind Tom Hanks as the sane answer to Cruise, and believing that the film would be the best thing since sliced bread. Expectations for opening weekend got more than a little out of control, but there were rationales for any opening at all better than M:I3, and the media were expected to sell them.
And then they showed the movie to an audience of critics in Cannes who, while not wrong about the problems with the film, took a glee in smashing the movie up unlike any I have seen in years.
Flip!
A huge opening weekend will soothe the situation to a great degree. But an excellent opening that doesn't look as huge will not. Worse, either way, the mood of the media right now suggests to me that we will get a lot of negative spin no matter what happens, unless Da Vinci somehow has a magic $90 million plus domestic opening.
It has been my considered opinion that the only critical response that can affect a big studio movie in a significant way is a unified one, all bad being more powerful than all good. We'll see if that plays out. But it would almost be a surprise if a $60 million opening weren't reported as a disappointment.
Interestingly, while Mission:Impossible III got a pass by over 70% of critics according to simple rating of Rotten Tomatoes, Poseidon was under 30%. Do critics matter? Apparently, not to the newspapers that run their criticism… unless, this summer, the reviews can be used to attack this week's target of ire.
In the middle was Poseidon, a movie that Warner Bros got a late start on selling and which was pretty universally panned once critics started seeing it. There wasn't as much hysteria, but the film, which became a daily treatise on its budget versus its soft domestic opening, was a log on the fire of the rage. Attacking it became like the light work out between heavy days at the gym.
Poseidon also kind of kick started the attacks on Superman Returns, more than six weeks before that film is released. Of course, if you go with the idea that the media is embracing its inner rage-a-holic, Superman Returns becomes the next and last great target for the summer. The Break-Up, Cars, Nacho Libre, and Click are in between, but none is a good enough bad story to get excited by, though any one of them could take off at any moment.
Expectations are the great villain so far this summer. Nacho Libre is made by the director of Napoleon Dynamite, which grossed a total of $45 million. Jack Black's career high opening, aside from King Kong (and the "disastrous" $50 million launch) was Shallow Hal ($22.5 million) and the much beloved School of Rock opened to ($19.6 million). So why would any sane person think that Nacho Libre could open to $30 million or $40 million? The irony is that the people pushing that huge number for this small film are supporters, not detractors. They believe in Jack Black and love the spots. But it is a set-up for disaster. And if, somehow, the film did open huge, the story would be that it was expected and there would not be the kind of positive hype that is the opposite to the negative hype about Mission: Impossible III's opening.
The battle right now is over the cost of Superman Returns. And there is reason for some of us to have an interest and to write about it. But as a consumer press story, it sucks. I mean, I understand the excitement. But for the movie to be positioned as a potential disaster this early, before its been seen by more than a handful of people, is a shame. And I have to take some responsibility for that, because I have spoken to other media about it and have been quoted, even as the studio tries to get control of the story.
And that is where it gets really scary, because I don't know if there is a real answer. Studios are not going to start honestly disclosing costs, any more than they are going to give the media weekly Home Entertainment sales information that is quantifiable. This is a smoke and mirrors business and even though there is a fiduciary responsibility to stock holders not to lie to the press about numbers, the fudge factor is high.
I don't resent this. In this way, we are adversarial. But here is the rub… journalists and studios are not really adversaries overall. We are symbiotic. And I think a lot of the rage from journalists comes from the feeling that studios are slowly eroding the long-standing relationship between the sides that has been he norm. There are reasons for this, good and bad, just as there are good and bad reasons for the speed and intensity of the web to be changing the tone and style of journalism.
The answers are not easy and not clear. But as long as we all keep reacting on the fly, in the heat of battle, the cycle will continue and forces that are greater than us will prevail upon us. No one is more of a hard ass than I when it comes to ripping into what I believe to be a true injustice… or even just a bad movie. But sometimes, it is all too much.
The media is a force of nature in the whirlwind. And it must be that in order to remain a free press. That is why the responsibility that any of us who proclaim ourselves media voices, old or new, carry is so enormous. But honorable institutions piling on is no less bullying and unfair than when dishonorable institutions do it. We never seem far from frenzy these days. Mutual Assured Destruction. Bad for you. Bad for me.
Just don't do it.
(In the meanwhile, there are just three great movies of the summer so far… 12 & Holding, District B13, and The Proposition. If they come to a theater near you, make the investment…. Unless you are squeamish… then you might want to go Over The Hedge.)
READER OF THE DAY: A tough Da Vinci Code response came from CHICAGO G: "I did read the book and it was absolute dreck. What helped finish the book were the ideas - whether true or not, they were kind of interesting. The characters were stock, at best. The dialogue was terrible and Brown's idea of creating suspense was to make the reader wait until the next chapter. As you may imagine, it didn't work. It sounds like the screenwriter was perfect for the job and very loyal to the book."
E Me: What will your weekend look like?
Week Of April 3, 2006 - Life In the Bubble - Mon / Wed / Fri
Week Of April 10, 2006 - List Week - Mon / Wed / Fri
Week Of April 17, 2006 - Review Week - Mon / Wed / Fri
Week Of April 24, 2006 - Overlooked Week - Mon / Wed / Fri
Week Of May 1, 2006 - Mystery Week - Tue / Wed / Fri
Week Of May 8, 2006 - How We Watch Week - Mon / Wed / Fri
