The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  So, did Inception become a money-spinning hit because it boasts a really smart script?

  I’d like to think so, but honestly, no.

  Would it have taken less money if it had been less intelligent?

  Maybe. Probably not. Who knows?

  Would it have taken more money if it been less intelligent? Maybe. Probably not. Who knows?

  Would it have made anything like that amount of money if it didn’t include:

  a) an A-list star

  b) eye-popping special effects

  c) a newsworthy budget?

  Definitely not.

  So what does the success – both financial and artistic – of Inception prove? Simply this: that (as I may have mentioned before) if you spend enough money, bag an A-list star and pile on the spectacle, the chances are your movie will not lose money (unless it’s a comedy), regardless of how smart or dumb it may be. Trying to be funny may be a massive risk (fail and your movie goes down) but trying to be clever never hurt anyone. Clearly, the exact amount of money a movie will ultimately make will be affected to some degree by whether or not anyone actually likes it; Titanic couldn’t have become a record-breaking profit-maker if some people hadn’t wanted to see it twice, and whatever my own personal problems with the film I concede that loads of people really do love it to pieces. But the fact remains that, if you obey the three rules of blockbuster entertainment, an intelligent script will not (as is widely claimed) make your movie tank or alienate your core audience. Even if they don’t understand the film, they’ll show up and pay to see it anyway – in just the same way they’ll flock to see films that are rubbish, and which they don’t actually enjoy. Like Pearl Harbor.

  This may sound like a terribly depressing scenario – that multiplex audiences will stump up for ‘event movies’ regardless of their quality. But look at it this way: if the audiences will show up whether a movie is good or bad, then does the opportunity not exist to make something genuinely adventurous with little or no risk? If the studio’s money is safe regardless of what they do, artistically speaking, why not do something of which they can be proud? If you’re working in a marketplace in which the right kind of gargantuan expense all but guarantees equivalent returns, where’s the downside in pushing the artistic envelope? Why dumb down when the dollar is going up?

  Why be Michael Bay when you could be Christopher Nolan?

  In fact, despite the asinine whining of those cultural collaborators who have invested their fortunes in the presumption of the stupidity of others, the blockbuster market arguably offers a level of artistic freedom that no other sector of film financing enjoys. The idea that creative risk must be limited to low or mid-priced movie-making (where you can in fact lose loads of money) while thick-headed reductionism rules the big-budget roost is in fact the very opposite of the truth. As David Puttnam has been saying for years, the biggest risk in Hollywood at the moment is making a mid-priced, artistically adventurous movie which has a great script but no stars or special effects, i.e. the kind of film that studios now view as potential financial Kryptonite. It is this area in which producers can most legitimately be forgiven for following a policy of cultural risk avoidance, because it is here that monetary shirts may still be lost. Remember – The Shawshank Redemption, a prison drama with no marquee-name stars or special effects, actually lost money in cinemas (it cost $35 million, of which it recouped only $18 million in its initial release period) before it went on to become one of the most popular movies of all time on home video. If it had cost $200 million, starred Tom Cruise and featured a couple of explosive break-out sequences, it would have broken even in the first few weeks – guaranteed.

  For further proof of money’s ability to make more money, look at the list of the most expensive movies of the past 20 years and see how infrequently they have failed to turn a profit, regardless of quality. Sam Raimi’s baggily sub-standard Spider-Man 3, which even the fans agree was a calamitous mess (unlike the first two instalments) cost $258 million and grossed $885 million worldwide. X-Men: The Last Stand, which tested the patience of devotees of both the comic books and the movies, ran up a bill of $210 million but still raked in $455 million worldwide. James Cameron’s Avatar (aka Smurfahontas, or Dances with Smurfs) cost $237 million and (if we include the unnecessarily extended ‘Special Edition’ re-release) has achieved global box-office takings just shy of $2.8 billion.

  Even David Fincher’s utterly up-itself The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an upmarket indulgence in which Brad Pitt plays a man who lives his life backwards, managed to balance its $150 million costs with worldwide box-office takings in the region of $329 million, thanks in part to well-placed news stories about its ultra-expensive special effects. If you take the oft-repeated industry maxim that a film must gross twice its negative cost (the price of actually making the film before incurring print, publicity and distribution costs) in order to earn its keep, then all of these movies were bona fide hits. Working on the same ratio, Bryan Singer’s dangerously star-free 2006 superhero flick Superman Returns, featuring Brandon ‘Who He?’ Routh, ‘underperformed’ at the box office, with takings of $390 million just failing to balance its official cost of $209 million (as opposed to the $270 million some reported) although ancillary revenues would certainly have pushed it into profit. Compare that with Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, which I really liked (although crucially my kids didn’t) but which only a fool would have financed to the tune of $100 million, since it contained no stars (Catherine Keener is an indie queen, James Gandolfini a safe bet only on TV) and boasted deliberately unspectacular (but nonetheless costly) special effects. Like Heaven’s Gate, Where the Wild Things Are was a movie whose budget was totally out of whack with the financial realities of what was on-screen, and it has been widely described as a chastening flop. Unlike Heaven’s Gate, however, Jonze’s folly still took around $100 million in theatres worldwide and has since recouped more on DVD and TV, meaning that the level of its ‘failure’ is far from studio-sinkingly spectacular. Once upon a time, a film like Where the Wild Things Are would have ended Spike Jonze’s career and sent industry bosses tumbling from high windows. Today, it is merely a curio from which everyone will walk away unscathed.

  This is the not-so-harsh reality of the movie business for top-end productions in the 21st century. For all the bleating and moaning and carping and whingeing that we constantly hear about studios struggling to make ends meet in the multimedia age, those with the means to splash money around will always come out on top. So the next time you pay good money to watch a really lousy summer blockbuster, remember this: the people who made that movie are wallowing in an endless ocean of cash, which isn’t going to dry up any time soon. They are floating on the financial equivalent of the Dead Sea, an expanse of water so full of rotting bodies turned to salt that it is literally impossible for them to sink. They could make better movies if they wanted, and the opulent ripples of buoyant hard currency would still continue to lap at their fattening suntanned bodies. If they fail to entertain, engage and amaze you, then it is because they can’t be bothered to do better. And if you accept that, then you are every bit as stupid as they think you are.

  This is no time to be nice to big budget movies. This is the time for them to start paying their way, both financially and artistically …

  Last summer, while attending the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference in downtown Los Angeles, I found myself with a day to spare and decided to take the kids to Universal Studios to ‘do’ the celebrated movie tour. Since movies seem to be in the process of mutating into glorified theme park rides, Universal were on to a winner with their celebrated trundle through a series of mocked-up movie sets in which famous screen moments are recreated in front of your very eyes, in a cheerfully clanking, grinding sort of way. Here, for example, was a clapboard mock-up of the town of Amity, built around a large lake from which a jolly rubber shark would emerge at four-minute intervals to terrorise your tour bus (this shark, inciden
tally, was both more convincing and more reliable than ‘Bruce’, the mechanical monster with which Spielberg was saddled during Jaws, and which kept on breaking down). Further on was a subway station that collapsed and imploded around you in homage to the seventies disaster epic Earthquake, a film which famously employed ‘Sensurround’ sound to give its audiences the collective collie-wobbles. Elsewhere, a crashed airplane belched smoke and flames amidst an apocalyptic landscape of smashed houses and broken streets, painstakingly constructed to resemble the scenes of devastation through which Tom Cruise stumbled in the recent remake of War of the Worlds. Actually, I’d stumbled through them myself a couple of years earlier when filming a documentary about Spielberg for BBC2. Having met the director in his idyllic Amblin offices (which are snuggled away in a quiet corner of the Universal lot), I mentioned that we were going to take a wander around the studio and maybe shoot some links on the appropriate exhibits, to which Spielberg enthusiastically replied, ‘Oh yeah, that War of the Worlds one is really … cinematic.’ Which indeed it was.

  As indeed it ought to be, frankly, considering the price of admission for those not lucky enough to be ‘wandering around’ after shooting the breeze with Steven Spielberg. In my altogether less glamorous role as a schlubby father of two (rather than a hoity British television presenter), I forked out $280 for the privilege of dragging my kids around Universal Studios for the day, insisting that we proceed at breakneck speed from one overcrowded attraction to the next without ever stopping for water or toilet breaks or whatever, on the basis that the more rides we went on, the less the comparative cost of each automated adventure. I am always like this at theme parks, behaving more like a general engaged in a military intervention than a father enjoying a nice day out with his kids. If I had my way, we’d show up two hours before opening and then, as soon as the gates open, blitz our way through all the rides before the crowds had a chance to catch up, ticking everything off by 10.30 a.m. and thereby allowing me to relax for the rest of the day. This never happens, however, and so my enjoyment is always tempered by a sense of gnawing anxiety that we’re not getting our money’s worth and a desperate need to do more in order to ensure that everything costs less. Comparatively speaking.

  Inevitably, as we stood queuing in the broiling heat (the primary pastime of US theme parks) I started to add up the vast sums of money involved in the creation and exploitation of Universal’s rides, and wondered whether their potential profit margins were ever factored into the original costs of movie production. Crucially, all the rides were related to hit movies, which made perfect sense; who’s going to pay to go on a ride that’s a spin-off of a film they never wanted to see in the first place? I noted with interest that the Hulk attraction, which was being built the last time I’d been there, had mysteriously disappeared, presumably because the movie itself had ‘underperformed’ so spectacularly (cost $137 million; took $242 million, which is as close as you can get to a flop nowadays). No such fate had befallen the Backdraft inferno in which I had also done some filming for a Channel 4 documentary about the indefatigability of disaster movies, way back in 2002. Having filmed several lengthy links that were specifically timed to coincide with the carefully choreographed explosions, I knew my way around this attraction, and knew exactly where to stand for the family to get the best view of the fiery action. As promised, we were all duly cooked by the ensuing excitement. It was just like being in a real burning building. Yay!

  As late afternoon rolled around, and we’d ticked off all the ‘important’ attractions (including Terminator 2: 3-D and Shrek 4-D), we decided that we’d ease up a little and take in something altogether less popular. So, with duly lowered expectations we strolled over to the Waterworld arena, a vast tank of water where extravagant high-wire structures were decked out to resemble the set of a movie which (according to popular mythology) had been a total flop, which no one had gone to see, and which had indeed precipitated the sale of the studio in whose backlot we were now standing.

  It should have been a ghost town. Yet 15 years after it first failed to make a bigger splash, Waterworld was doing faster business than ever. The arena was packed – you had to fight for a seat. And as the stand-in stuntmen jet-skied into view, spraying water as they skimmed hither and thither, falling and flying and generally flailing around as things went ‘KABOOM!’ around them, the crowd went mad: cheering the guy who didn’t look anything like Kevin Costner, booing the guy who looked a little bit like Dennis Hopper, and generally pretending to understand a storyline which hadn’t made any sense in the first place – not that it mattered. The whole show lasted about 20 minutes, at the end of which the entire cast got encores and standing ovations. It was like watching a rock band. Only wet.

  As we all straggled out of the arena, I did a bit of O-level mental arithmetic and calculated (dividing the cost of admission by the number of shows/rides we’d seen/been on) that the Waterworld knees-up had cost me somewhere in the region of $28, about the same amount it would have cost to take the family to the cinema. All of which meant that a decade and a half after its damp-squib opening weekend, Waterworld (in some form or another) was still generating a steady stream of cash, still making the money it was meant to have lost, and still attracting paying punters who presumably wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

  ‘Did you enjoy that?’ I asked the middle-aged man who was sitting in the crowd next to us, his offspring similarly in tow, all of them enthusiastically vocal during the performance.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied, ‘it was great. We got soaked.’

  ‘Did you ever see the movie?’ I asked.

  He frowned.

  ‘What? The Waterworld movie? No. I don’t think so. Oh, hang on … maybe on TV. I’m not sure. Or maybe video. Yeah, I think it was on video.’

  ‘But you didn’t see it in the cinema?’

  ‘No. On video.’

  ‘What about your kids?’

  ‘No, man, they’re too young.’

  ‘To watch the film?’

  ‘They weren’t even born when it came out.’

  ‘But they knew about it?’

  He looked at me as if I was an idiot.

  ‘Yeah, of course they knew about it. Everyone knows about it. It’s Waterworld. It’s huge, man. Huge … like Jaws, you know …’

  ‘Did you ever see Jaws?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But did you go on the ride?’

  ‘Yeah, it was awesome.’

  He paused for a moment, then added, ‘You see Jaws?’

  ‘Oh sure,’ I replied. ‘Loads of times.’

  He thought about this for a while, and then almost as an afterthought asked, ‘Was it as good as Waterworld …?’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I replied aghast. ‘Jaws is a million times better than Waterworld!’

  The guy looked taken aback.

  ‘A million times better than Waterworld …’ he said, shaking his head, apparently overwhelmed by such a prospect.

  ‘Wow’ he said finally, ‘that must be really good …’

  Chapter Three

  THE INEVITABLE DECLINE OF 3-D

  ‘O pointy birds, O pointy pointy …’

  John Lillison

  PICTURE THIS …

  A one-eyed man is standing on a railway track in the middle of a desert, the straight line of the track stretching off toward the horizon, disappearing eventually into the distance. Far, far away down the line, a small black dot starts to grow in size, slowly at first but with increasing rapidity. As the dot grows, it gradually begins to take the form of a steam engine: a big, black beast with an aggressive tooth-like cow-catcher on the front, a silver circular emblem above this and a giant, funnelled chimney stack on top. You know, like the ones you see in cowboy films which inevitably get held up by men wearing scarves over their faces, one of whom turns out to be Brad Pitt with a beard. Only this one doesn’t get held up. Instead it just continues to get bigger and bigger. And as it gets bigger, the one-eyed man is ab
le to hear the noise the engine is making – a great honking, steaming, squawking cacophony of biliousness – accompanied by the clattering and clanging of its weighty steel wheels on the iron of the railway track. The engine continues to get bigger and louder and clearer, and as it does so the amount of track the one-eyed man can see stretching away from him inexorably diminishes, blocked out by the growing spectre of the steam train. Eventually the train is so large, and the amount of track still visible so small, that the one-eyed man can see almost nothing but the big, black engine with the looming cow-catcher that seems almost bigger than him. The sound of the engine is deafening, the sight of the steaming funnel transfixing and the rate of their comparative growth in size positively alarming. And at the very last moment, just before the engine ploughs into the man and turns him into a human skid-mark, our monocular anti-hero thinks:

  ‘Damn, if only I could see in 3-D.’

  Or how about this …

  You’re sitting in the Empire, Leicester Square, arguably the best cinema auditorium in the country, watching a reissue of David Lean’s epic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia. About 40 minutes into the screening (which, incidentally, is unencumbered by other badly behaved patrons kicking your seat from behind, or obstructing your view from in front, or annoying your ears from the side) we get to the epochal shot that introduces Omar Sharif’s character, Sherif Ali, who appears out of the distance, riding majestically upon a camel. It’s a long shot, beautifully framed and held for what seems like an eternity (in fact, around two minutes – with edits), far longer than classical wisdom tells us is appropriate. At first, it’s almost impossible to make out the tiny shape in the distant landscape, but as Sharif and his camel come closer, falling gradually into focus, the sense of regal mystery is overpowering, awe-inspiring, transcendent …