The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  And she was right. In every possible way.

  The fact is that I am not (and have never been) a teenage girl. Consequently, I did not buy into the Rose and Jack love story in the way that armies of teenage girls were doing all around the world. And not doing just once; the real genius of Titanic was that its core audience went to see it time and time again. When you start analysing the mind-boggling box-office figures for the movie, you very quickly realise that repeat viewing played a significant factor in the film’s success. As the makers of the Twilight series have since discovered, the teen-girl demographic may be hard to crack, but if you succeed the rewards of their eternal devotion are substantial. To all intents and purposes, Bella and Edward are the latterday Jack and Rose. The difference is that the Twilight movies don’t cost £200 million to make. (Maybe that’s why I like them so much more than Titanic.)

  As for myself, I would have ditched Jack and married Billy Zane, who has better hair (all of it wigs!) and who seemed to be the only actor in Titanic who really understood the film’s cheesy B-movie roots. Plus, anyone who has David Warner for a butler is OK in my book.

  But the real question is whether Titanic could have broken even without the teen-girl support network. Would it have done all right if Kate and Leo hadn’t captured the pubescent imagination? Of course it would. Why? Because it was a really expensive ‘event movie’ featuring huge special effects of the kind that just don’t lose money anymore. For a year before the film hit theatres, the papers had been full of its gargantuan budgetary requirements. The casting of Winslet had sparked a press furore which some have compared to the ‘search for Scarlett’ hoo-ha that accompanied Gone with the Wind. And the promise of watching a really big boat sink in glorious widescreen detail had all the spectacular allure of watching a really big boat go belly-up in Irwin Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure (cost $5 million; US gross $93 million), or watching a really big building burn in Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno (cost $14 million; US gross $116 million), the latter of which had also laid the template for Titanic’s ‘shared liability’ co-production, with Fox and Warner splitting the bill.

  The fact is that even if Titanic had zero romantic appeal, it still would have made its money back. Eventually. For proof, look no further than Pearl Harbor, which gives us a unique insight into what could have happened to Titanic if it had turned out to be really rubbish. For in the end, what is Michael Bay’s monstrosity if not a cack-handed remake of James Cameron’s hit? Just look at the key ingredients:

  Historical tragedy? Check.

  Sinking boats? Check.

  English rose actress? Check.

  American hunks? Check.

  Awful pop theme song? Check.

  Massive expense? Check.

  Engaging love story? Er …

  Just think of the business Pearl Harbor could have done if Michael Bay had shown any genuine talent for putting recognisable human emotions on screen, if he was anything more than a peddler of grand-scale mechanical porn. Bay admitted that some people didn’t ‘get’ the love story in Pearl Harbor, but it still took $450 million worldwide. Imagine how much more it could have taken if those people had actually liked it.

  The difference between Pearl Harbor and Titanic is that, for all its faults, Titanic really worked for the devoted section of the audience who loved the movie and went to see it loads of times. These were the people who turned it from a sure-fire investment into a runaway success. These are the people to whom the producers owe a debt of gratitude, the people who made Titanic the most successful movie of all time (until Avatar). But make no mistake – without them, the movie would still have recouped its costs in the end. In the worst case scenario, if Titanic had been viewed as utter, utter crap by everyone who saw it, it still would have been Pearl Harbor: The Prequel or Waterworld: Part Deux.

  And, as we have seen, in financial terms that’s not the very ‘worst’ after all.

  Event movies no longer flop.

  Nowadays, they just ‘underperform’.

  In fact, for an expensive movie to really break the bank in the current marketplace it has to be a genuine ‘non-event’, and the biggest non-events around have a horrible tendency to be comedies. There’s an age-old maxim that laughter is priceless but comedy should be cheap, and nowhere is this truer than in the cinema. Time and again, film-makers have fallen flat on their faces by imagining that there’s something inherently amusing about extravagant expense. There isn’t. Blowing up aircraft carriers and sinking huge boats may be fun, but it’s not funny. Crucial difference. If audiences pay to see a film-maker spending hundreds of millions of dollars doing something really stupid (like Costner with Waterworld), then they don’t want to laugh with the movie – they want to laugh at it.

  It is significant that over the course of a career which has included horror films, sci-fi romps, historical epics, literary adaptations, war movies, action adventures and even a ghostly romance, the only time Steven Spielberg has come genuinely unstuck was when he decided to make a really expensive comedy. In some ways, his bloated Second World War farrago 1941 can be seen as a companion piece to Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor – a film which takes a historical tragedy (America’s bloody war with Japan) and turns it into a dreary farce. Both movies are bloated, baggy, boring, fantastically ill-judged, bum-numbingly long, and ludicrously wasteful in terms of dollars spent for enjoyment had. The only real difference between these two stinkers is that Spielberg wanted his audience to laugh while Bay wanted them to cry. Both directors failed badly in their respective endeavours, but whereas Bay still scored a financial hit by virtue of his movie’s non-comic ‘event’ status, Spielberg took a bath because nothing sinks faster than an unfunny comedy, regardless of how much cash you throw at it. (Incidentally, when I raised the spectre of 1941 in an interview with Spielberg himself, he conceded that extravagance had indeed got the better of him but insisted that the film had not lost money in the long run – it had merely ‘underperformed’ in the short term.)

  A quick glance at the list of money-losing, non-event failures of the past 25 years reveals unfunny comedy as the killer ingredient every time. In 1987 the aforementioned Ishtar, a ‘romantic comedy’ in which Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman play lousy lounge singers stumbling into a web of Middle Eastern intrigue, proved that spending $51 million in the pursuit of cheap jokes really was no laughing matter. Just over a decade later, Beatty would star in another money-haemorrhaging failure – the ‘middle-aged sex comedy’ Town & Country – which proved rather less welcome than a dose of the clap. Finally released three years after production began, the film’s ever-spiralling budget hit a reported $90 million, but it managed to gross less than $7 million in the US, committing the threefold sins of: a) costing far too much; b) not being spectacular; and c) trying to be funny – a lethal combination.

  It is arguable that comic misjudgement was the undoing of the nineties ‘action comedy’ flop Hudson Hawk, which racked up bills of $70 million, some of which was reportedly spent on teams of special-effects men who laboured to ‘fix’ Bruce Willis’s receding hair. If the film had been played straight, as no more than an extravagant adventure with a big star and a few dazzling visual set pieces, director Michael Lehmann (reportedly nicknamed Michael ‘Lame Man’ on set) might just have walked away from the wreckage in one piece. I remember being at a press screening for Hudson Hawk at the Odeon Leicester Square, where the stunning silence that greeted the movie’s endless stream of self-referential in-jokes was broken only by the sound of fellow critic Kim Newman and me howling like hyenas. The more no one else laughed, the funnier Hudson Hawk became (at least for Kim and me), and at the end of the screening we pretty much had to crawl out on our hands and knees, having been doubled-up with paralysing merriment for so long. But the film’s failure to hit anyone else’s funny bone meant that it took a pitiful $17 million in the US (although it did, inevitably, become something of a ‘hit’ on video). A few years after that screening I was on a radio show wit
h Willis’s co-star Richard E. Grant, who described Hudson Hawk as ‘a steaming hot pile of elephant droppings’. When I told him how much I had enjoyed it he was genuinely shocked, and not a little outraged. The film had kicked the crap out of TriStar’s already crumbling finances, and Grant was still gamely struggling to put the stench of its failure behind him. Yet as recently as June 2011, the thoroughly respectable Sight & Sound magazine published a passionate defence of Hudson Hawk that listed it as one of the overlooked multiplex gems of the past 30 years, not least because ‘as the Mayflower twins, Sandra Bernhard and Richard E. Grant are among the best comic villains ever’. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is that comedy (unlike sheer spectacle) is a toxically unpredictable commodity, which simply cannot be relied upon to tickle an audience’s fancy and which, if mishandled, will blow up in a film-maker’s face.

  For further proof of the dangers of misjudging expensive laughs, look no further than Renny Harlin’s 1995 pirate comedy Cutthroat Island. The film (which regularly appears in lists of all time flops, as indeed does Roman Polanski’s comparable Pirates) cost and lost about the same amount as Hudson Hawk, although it is no worse a movie than Pirates of the Caribbean, which duly made a fortune rehashing the same tired riffs a decade later. But crucially POTC wasn’t sold as a ‘comedy’ – rather, it was marketed as a spectacular thrill ride in the mould of Indiana Jones, a fantastical adventure packed with eye-popping spectacle which just happened to contain a few take-it-or-leave-it jokes. In fact, according to all reports, the studio were genuinely terrified when they first saw the rushes of Johnny Depp doing his ‘humorous’ Keith Richards impression and begged director Gore Verbinski to get him to tone it down, for fear that his outrageous gurning might actually kill the movie. The last thing the money men wanted was an expensive movie (based on a popular fairground ride) that depended upon making the audience laugh for its success rather than simply bludgeoning them with stars and whizzo special effects. Their fears turned out to be unfounded when it transpired that audiences were actually charmed by Depp’s shambling antics – a response which still baffles me to this day – and POTC became a socking great hit. But the fact remains that, had Depp’s humorous schtick fallen as flat with a mainstream audience as it did with me, the film could have joined Cutthroat Island in the ranks of overpriced failures which have demonstrated that (in the words of Woody Allen) insufficient laughter is grounds for divorce.

  The ne plus ultra of this rule was the 2002 Eddie Murphy ‘comedy fantasy’ The Adventures of Pluto Nash, for which divorce proceedings swiftly gave way to a restraining order that prevented the movie from getting within a 50-mile radius of its intended audience. Costing $100 million, almost none of which it recouped on its horrendous theatrical release, Pluto Nash left Castle Rock executives crying into their cappuccinos when Murphy deemed the movie too embarrassingly unfunny to promote. Just think about that for a moment – a film which is so staggeringly lacking in laughs that even Eddie Murphy didn’t want to be associated with it. How unfunny could that be? This is the same Eddie Murphy who once ‘joked’ that director John Landis was more likely to work again with Vic Morrow (who was decapitated on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie) than with him, but who still signed on for Landis’s Beverly Hills Cop 3 when the fat pay cheque was dangled before his eyes. The same Eddie Murphy who torched his chances of winning an Oscar for his stand-out role in Dreamgirls by donning the fat suit for Norbit, which was released in time to remind Academy members just how ghastly he could be. The same Eddie Murphy whose greatest role to date has been providing the voice of Donkey in the Shrek movies, proving conclusively that one thing he is guaranteed to get right is talking out of his ass. When a comedian of that calibre tells you that Pluto Nash doesn’t meet his quality-control standards, you know you need to steer well clear, which movie-goers did in their millions. In ‘absolute financial terms’ (i.e. regardless of any adjustments for inflation or ancillary sales) Pluto Nash was long-regarded by some industry watchers to have accrued the biggest theatrical money loss ever: somewhere in the region of $96 million – a figure which easily overshadows the losses of Kevin Costner’s super-serious 1997 dud The Postman (aka ‘Post-Apocalyptic Pat’), which flopped for being expensive but solidly unspectacular, but which would surely have done even worse if Kevin had told jokes.

  While Speed Racer (no stars), The Alamo (little spectacle) and Sahara (Hudson Hawk-y humour) all posted losses in the noughties, the only recent movie to bear catastrophic comparison with Pluto Nash is the Robert Zemeckis produced Mars Needs Moms, which had an estimated budget of something in the region of $150 million but which took a paltry $21 million in the US and $35 million in total worldwide – a figure which should make even Eddie Murphy laugh. There are umpteen reasons why Zemeckis’s folly failed to recoup (a movie costing that much needs to be a spectacular star-studded ‘event’ rather than a limp motion-capture comedy featuring the voices of Seth Green and Joan Cusack) but, as we shall see in the next chapter, the real explanation for its monstrous reception may well have more to do with a collective audience protest against the overpriced tyranny of 3-D than with any innate dramatic failings.

  In the meantime, we are still left with the general rule that bona fide event movies featuring proper stars, massive visual extravagance and newsworthy budgets are still a depressingly safe bet as long as you’re not banking on making anyone laugh. All of which raises a very simple question: if an event movie can make its money back no matter how unpalatably awful it may be (as long as it abides by a fairly simple set of rules) why not make something really good just for the hell of it? If the presence of a whopping budget, a retina-scorching spectacle and a beezer cast list is all you need to break even, why bother to make something as terrible as Pearl Harbor? Why not go hell for leather and make something decent? If financial success is all but guaranteed in the long run, doesn’t that actually offer the most extraordinary artistic freedom?

  Or look at it this way …

  Every time I complain that a blockbuster movie is directorially dumb, or insultingly scripted, or crappily acted, or artistically barren, I get a torrent of emails from alleged mainstream-movie lovers complaining that I (as a snotty critic) am applying highbrow criteria that cannot and should not be applied to good old undemanding blockbuster entertainment. I am not alone in this; every critic worth their salt has been lectured about their distance from the demands of ‘popular cinema’, or has been told that their views are somehow elitist and out of touch (and if you haven’t been told this then you are not a critic, you are a ‘showbiz correspondent’). This has become the shrieking refrain of 21st-century film (anti)culture – the idea that critics are just too clever for their own good, have seen too many movies to know what the average punter wants, and are therefore sorely unqualified to pass judgement on the popcorn fodder that ‘real’ cinema-goers demand from the movies.

  This is baloney – and worse, it is pernicious baloney peddled by people who are only interested in money and don’t give a damn about cinema. The problem with movies today is not that ‘real’ cinema-goers love garbage whilst critics only like poncy foreign language arthouse fare. The problem is that we’ve all learned to tolerate a level of overpaid, institutionalised corporate dreadfulness that no one actually likes but everyone meekly accepts because we’ve all been told that blockbuster movies have to be stupid to survive. Being intelligent will cause them to become unpopular. Duh! The more money you spend, the dumb and dumberer you have to be. You know the drill: no one went broke underestimating the public intelligence. That’s just how it is, OK?

  Well, actually, no. You want proof?

  OK. Exhibit A: Inception.

  Inception is an artistically ambitious and intellectually challenging thriller from writer/director Christopher Nolan, who made his name with the temporally dislocated low-budget ‘arthouse’ puzzler Memento. Nolan unfashionably imagines that his audience are sentient beings, and treats them as such regardless of budget. Memento cos
t $5 million, had no stars or special effects, aimed high nonetheless, expected its audience to keep up, and reaped over $25 million in the US alone. Inception cost $160 million, had huge stars and blinding special effects, aimed high nonetheless, expected its audience to keep up, and took around $800 million worldwide. See a connection here?

  Nolan earned the right to make a movie as intelligent and expensive as Inception by grossing Warner Bros close to $1.5 billion with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, both of which can best be described as arthouse movies posing as massive franchise blockbusters. I remember being genuinely stunned by the level of invention at work in Batman Begins, and burbling to Radio 5 Live listeners that it was ‘far, far smarter than any of us had the right to expect from a movie which cost that much’. But why shouldn’t it be smart? Why shouldn’t we expect movies that ‘cost that much’ to be worth it? Because we have been told for too long that popular movies must, by their very nature, be terrible, and we’ve all learned to accept this horrendous untruth.

  As for Inception, the idea that a ‘mainstream’ audience could embrace a movie that includes the lines ‘Sorry, whose dream are we in?’ and ‘He’s militarised his subsconsious!’ would seem anathema to the studio heads (and their mealy-mouthed media minions), who have been telling us for decades that dumb is beautiful. Yet Nolan has become one of the most financially reliable directors working in Hollywood without ever checking his intellect in at the door. Did no one ever explain the rules to him? Did he miss a meeting?

  Don’t get me wrong; Inception isn’t perfect, nor is it ‘stunningly original’, as some would have you believe. The plot, which revolves around explosive industrial espionage played out within the interlocking layers of an unsuspecting psyche, is essentially Dreamscape with A-levels and draws upon a number of populist sources, ranging from Wes Craven’s horror sequel A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors to Alejandro Amenábar’s Spanish oddity Open Your Eyes (later remade in Hollywood as the inferior Tom Cruise vehicle Vanilla Sky). It is also, in essence, an existential Bond movie: On Her Majesty’s Psychiatric Service. But like great pop music, groundbreaking cinema rarely arrives ex nihilo, and the fact that Nolan seems to have watched (and loved) a lot of genre trash in his time merely increases his significant stature in my eyes. Too many blockbuster movies nowadays seem to be made by people who hate cinema, who have seen too few movies, and who have nothing but contempt for the audiences who pay their grotesquely over-inflated salaries.