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Week Of July 9, 2007 - Mon / Wed / Fri
July 9, 2007
The Corporations Are Coming... QuietlySize does matter.
I plan on getting further into the details of this summer in the 20 Weeks column later this week, but from films to television to the theater, the quiet revolution of the bite-sized continues.
This is a different issue than the niche-ing of the world. The niche mindset is a party to all of this. But there seems to be something different at play ... something about the corporate creep, which the high minded have always claimed was having a direct effect on the content being created by the networks and studios. (Oh, to recall that just three presidents ago the networks were not allowed to play in the content ownership/creation pool at all.) And now, in an unforeseen way, that influence is growing.
Here in New York, I had not realized how the 90-120 minute show, without intermission, and often without major stars or the kind of grandiosity that defined the Lloyd Weber error ... uh, era, had become such a significant presence on Broadway. Ironically, theater purists have been bitching and moaning about Las Vegas grabbing some hit shows and giving them a set Vegas home, disallowing touring for a few years, one of the big complaints being that the casinos have had the shows cut down to 90 minutes so gamblers are not away from the tables for too long. Meanwhile, show after show seems cut from that cloth.
We saw Avenue Q on Sunday, after missing it for about 3 years, and while it may have been cut a bit for its failed Vegas run, it was not so much cutting, really. The show is basically a seven person cast, a small live band (not orchestra), a very clever single set, and barely cracked 2 hours, even with the intermission.
Compare this to Light In The Piazza, a show with a big, complex (albeit simple looking) set, a big old school score, and a dense score of songs that work more as a part of the whole than as individual "singles."
Both are great shows, but Piazza was probably more expensive to run, week to week. And it was much harder to sell, without the hook of being a Sesame Street alternative or a few bits of lyric playing like a very funny comedy hook. ("It sucks to be me!!!") As a result, Avenue Q has been running for years now and Light In The Piazza barely made it to a year (if that).
When I wrote about Xanadu last week, I questioned what its Broadway life might look like because it is so intimate a show, feeling more Off-Broadway than Broadway. And I still think I am right on that ... but I also wonder more than before whether I might be wrong.
We saw 10 Million Miles, the new birthing of the Atlantic Theater Company and Michael Mayer, who gave us this year's Tony winner, Spring Awakening. Four people, a very cleverly designed truck, and lots of great lighting effects. I can only imagine what Spring Awakening looked like on that same stage a couple of years ago, but it is easy to imagine that show staged smaller. And like Xanadu, on Broadway, Spring Awakening uses the device of seating people on stage to create more intimacy and to shrink the vast expanse of the Broadway stage.
It's not just musicals. Frost/Nixon actually got some hand-wringing comments over the Broadway theater being too big to hold the show, which was born at the very intimate Donmar Warehouse in London.
It used to be that we knew "this is Broadway" and "this is Off-Broadway." And I think there are some "rules." But fewer and fewer. Shows like Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Picture Show and others without the word "Horror" in the title have found themselves remounted on Broadway when they were essentially Off-Broadway product.
I assume - and will further investigate - that this is all being driven by ambition and economies of scale. The cost of putting a show up in New York, on or off Broadway, has become so great that the value of a smaller production has been diminished ... the win not as big ... and the loss just as likely. This is not unlike the studio response to the indie movement, which has now become a studio movement of a different kind.
Television has changed dramatically in the last five years or so. I have always thought of it as a DVD-driven move to the British style of doing TV in smaller bites. The British series have generally been under 10 episodes per "season" and have not usually been designed to push along in season after season. The result is that series are most often written entirely by the creator/producer and not by a rotating team of writers, supervised by the showrunner. This leads to coherence and stronger ideas. (Some of America's best loved series are the ones in which the showrunner was the most hands on, retooling every script to truly fit their voice. The main reason HBO series, when the are good, are better than traditional TV is not the language or sex ... it's the time taken, episodes often spending two times or three times longer than network TV in gestation.) As a result of this new format, where the season can stand alone, each season has its own fiscal value and the absolute need to hit 100 for syndication, as things used to work, has become a secondary or tertiary factor (albeit the preferred course).
But then it struck me again ... corporations, economies of scale, and risk/reward.
If a creative company or person is challenged, the result is often emotional, or better or worse. But a corporation is, by its nature, risk averse. The highs are not as important. The lows are not as important (unless they are really, really low). The goal is to keep everything financial - and therefore most things creative - right down the middle.
At the moment, the Law & Order franchise represents tradition, albeit, having created new models in its move forward. L&O is winning in virtually every way possible, in network, in syndication on multiple networks, in immediate repeats on an NBC-owned cable net, and in DVD sell-thru. Meanwhile, shows like 24 represent the new model. For the first time in television history, series that may be borderline for future seasons are in profit before they ever get anywhere near syndication.
This might simply mean that you can more easily watch the entire last season of a show you like in 2 or 3 or 4 sittings. What it means to the corporation is that their risk has been all but eliminated. Even "failed" shows, like Arrested Development, are now money makers. However, what the corporations might be missing in all this happy avarice is that the future value of libraries should be dropping like a stone. What used to be a constant churn looking for new ancillary value in increasingly pricey libraries is in the process of becoming nothing more than a pyramid scheme ... get in early and make money or get in late and pay for everyone else getting rich.
But most importantly, again ... little to no risk with potential huge upside when the jackpot hits.
In the movie business, this is all represented by the studios slowly trying to slink away from the business of funding movies. The shift is on to all the studios being service bases for outside film funders to use for full-service distribution. There is money in funding... but only if you are very lucky and very careful, two notions that are out of place in the movie game.
While we are all busy analyzing every opening weekend, the big picture looks utterly different. For instance, some analysts just noticed that June is down at the box office from past years and that the summer is not as overwhelming as it first felt. The only problem I have with that is that the story is not June, but May. The story is that even with three $100 million openings, the month, day for day, was only $12 million ahead of the previous holder of the Best May title, 2002's Spider-Man/Attack of the Clones month. Obviously, with inflation, this is not the best year. (Ticket sales, which are only estimated, remain a truly irrelevant figure that should not be used by serious media. Every summer, kids films sell a lot more tickets than their more mature cousins ... but the dollars are the dollars are the dollars ... only exhibitors, who make their money on attendance, are really affected by this stat.)
We had three of the five biggest openings of ALL TIME in one month ... it was the first time there were three $100 million openings in a season, much less a single month ... and both of those firsts led to a $12 million win for that month. BLECH!
The only reason the Yankees still behave as they do (and have been followed by the Red Sox, the Orioles and others) is because they can still make a significant profit in spite of profligate salary giving. This is no longer true of the film business.
A decade ago, I was laughed at for suggesting that a $100 million domestic grosser could lose money. And now, here we are. We have reached the moment at which you can have a $100 million opening and still be a fiscal, bottom line disappointment to the studio. And while Pirates and Spidey are both going to be over $900 million worldwide at the box office, making both profitable, neither will be anywhere as profitable as their predecessors.
And so, small ball becomes the game of choice.
(More on Thursday on MCN)
E Me.
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
Week Of May 15, 2006 - Premature Week - Oscar Mon / Wed / Fri
Week Of May 22, 2006 - B-13 Mon / Inconvenient Wed / Fri
Week Of May 29, 2006 - Wed / Fri
Week Of June 5, 2006 - 666 Tue / Iraq Doc Wed / Seattle Fri
Week Of June 12, 2006 - SIFF Mon / SIFF Wed / Fri
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Week Of July 17, 2006 - 8 A Year Mon / Water Wed / Revamp Fri
Week Of July 24, 2006 - Comic-Con Mon / Gossip Wed / Fri
Week Of July 31, 2006 - Mel G Mon / Talladega Wed / Fri
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Week Of October 23, 2006 - TCIFF Mon / Wed / Catch A Fri
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Week Of December 27, 2006 - Wed / Worst of 2006 Fri
Week Of Janiuary 3, 2007 - Best Of 2006 Wed
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Week Of January 17, 2007 - Little Red Writing Hood Wed
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Week Of February 26, 2007 - Rough Oscars Mon / Zodiac Wed / Doc & Foreign Fri
Week Of March 5, 2007 - Mon / Fri
March 14 / March 21/ March 28
Week Of April 4, 2007 - Wed / Grindhouse Fri
Week Of April 9, 2007 - Indie Distirbution Mon / Star Ranking Wed / Top 20 Fri
Week Of April 16, 2007 - Mon / Piaf Wed
Week Of April 23, 2007 - Mon / Tribeca Wed / Costner Fri
Week Of April 30, 2007 - Spider Mon
Week Of May 7, 2007 - Mon / Wed / Fri
Week Of May 14, 2007 - 10 Thing Studios Don't Want Wed / Fri
Week Of May 21, 2007 - Mon / Pirates Fri
Week Of May 28, 2007 - Knocked Up Friday
Week Of June 4, 2007 - Hostel 2 Mon / Ocean's Wed / Seattle Fri
Week Of June 11, 2007 - Sopranos Mon
Week Of June 18, 2007 - Mon / Sicko Wed
Week Of July 2, 2007 - Xanadu Fri
