3-D Stats are Trending Down

Hollywood would like to think that 3-D cures all ills. But the stats don’t lie, as a discerning public picks and chooses the 3-D movies that are clearly worth paying a premium for. Check out The Wrap’s analylsis of 3-D performance. The studios may want to reconsider throwing good money after bad when they try to buttress their returns on a bad B-movie with retrofitted 3-D. I quickly started to tune out Step Up 3-D, which actually had some good dancing, which I would much rather have seen in good old-fashioned 2-D. The intrusive 3-D wore out its welcome real fast. (Variety’s Justin Chang disagrees.)

When a smart filmmaker who knows what he’s doing—especially in an all-digital universe like CG animation—shoots with 3-D, the results can be spectacular. James Cameron and Pixar have set the bar very high. Few movies will deliver as stellar 3-D as Avatar or Up and Toy Story 3.

Whatever happened to the box-office bomb?

People are understandably excited about Christopher Nolan's Inception. To start with, it marks the director's first film since his 2008 mega-smash The Dark Knight, which took more than $1 billion at the box office. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a dream thief who breaks into people's minds and steals their ideas, thus suggesting not only a blockbuster requiring an intimate knowledge of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy to understand it but also a withering satire on the way Hollywood comes up with its summer movie ideas. Most importantly of all, of course, it affords audiences a peek at that most endangered of species, an original idea for a motion picture, making it the only movie this year that could reasonably fail.

Remember that? When films used to fail? Films get called "bombs" all the time, of course—or "disappointments" to use the modern term. This year Prince of Persia, The A-Team, and Robin Hood all "underperformed," taking $190 million, $84 million, and $61 million respectively, although for the true belly flops, we must turn to poor old Jonah Hex, which debuted last weekend with a dismal $5 million, or Uma Thurman's Motherhood, a comedy about a stressed-out Manhattan mother that took just 88 pounds when it opened in the United Kingdom earlier this year. On one Sunday, the box-office sales totaled just 9 pounds, meaning that only one person bought a ticket, thus providing a fresh twist on the old Buddhist paradox: Can a movie be said to bomb if nobody even sees it go off?

The movie bomb used to be one of the more raucous spectator sports in America—watching Hollywood gather together some of the finest talents in the land, throw barrowfuls of money at them, lock them in a sound stage, and not let them out until they had made the biggest, proudest, costliest turkeys yet devised by human hand. Bonfire of the Vanities. Waterworld. Last Action Hero. Cutthroat Island. Their names alone were legend. They bestrode the world like colossi, their charred, rusting bulks a testament to the reach of man's hubris, the folly of human dreams, and the price of bottled water at Spago. They were so famous, people wrote books about them; we pored over every directorial temper tantrum and movie-star sulk like fish inspecting a shipwreck, looking for signs of the times, auguries of things to come, or else just a cheap shot of schadenfreude, although frequently it would be the bombs themselves that had the last laugh. Their notoriety was so great, their shadows so long, that eventually they were subjected to the same revisionism that envelops anything that sticks around in the culture for long enough. Recent critical opinion has it that Heaven's Gate is not a bad film, just a ruinously costly one, and even Ishtar has its defenders—ironic, coquettish types who wink at you from behind their yashmaghs.

What's happened to those films—the megabombs, the nuclear flops? Look up the list of the biggest flops on Wikipedia and you'll find plenty of movies from the last 10 years: You just won't have heard of them. Did anyone here see The 13^th Warrior, a 1999 Viking-and-cannibal flick with Antonio Banderas and Omar Sharif? Or what about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a computer-animated Japanese-American co-production about marauding phantoms featuring the voices of Donald Sutherland and James Woods? Sad to say I neglected to see Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, a 2002 secret-agent thriller starring Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu, but I neglected even to hear about Soldier, a 1998 sci-fi flick starring Kurt Russell and Gary Busey. As for Anne Bancroft's last role, alongside Freddie Prinze Jr. and Jennifer Love Hewitt in the computer-animated dragon fantasy Delgo—well, here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. Jesus loves you more than you will know.

Together, these movies lost in excess of $1 billion at the box office. They didn't explode so much as implode, sucking up all traces of their existence like those depth charges you see go off in submarine movies, first pluming outward then, just as quickly, inward, smothered by the pound-for-pound pressure at 40 fathoms, of wherever it is that Japanese-American computer- animated co-productions starring Antonio Banderas like to lurk. There are some higher-profile productions in there—Gigli (2003), Battlefield Earth (2000), Catwoman (2004) all have something of the old negative glamour, the inverted stature—but to a large degree, we are in an A-list-free zone. The Alamo (2004) was all set to be a true $200-million stinker starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ron Howard until Disney got cold feet and stripped it down to a 95 million "disappointment" directed by John Lee Hancock and starring Dennis Quaid. Darren Aronofsky looked to be nursing along a beautifully misguided $70 million folly with The Fountain, his metaphysical head-scratcher set in three different time zones and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, until Warner Bros. pulled the plug and forced him to make it for $35 million with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz instead. Where's the fun in that?

In a way it was inevitable that Hollywood would wise up. The costs of franchise moviemaking had gotten too high, the risks too great. Failure was always such an un-American concept, anyway; it made perfect sense to simply abolish it. Not all failure, of course—we still get out Jonah Hexes and A-Teams—but here's what you don't see anymore: big box office failures of the magnitude of Waterworld, Wild Wild West, Hudson Hawk, Last Action Hero, or Cutthroat Island, the swashbuckler that derailed the careers of Renny Harlin, Geena Davis, and Matthew Modine—and the last film to actually force a movie studio to close, Heaven's Gate-style. By the time we got to Titanic in 1997*, Fox and Paramount would have the sense to split the costs between them.

That didn't stop the Los Angeles Times from running a daily "Titanic Watch" column detailing the troubled production's every snag and snafu. Through the '80s and nineties, the press grew very adept at spotting these things ahead of time. A fired DP. Rewrites. Reshoots. A runaway budget. Those deliciously evocative words "action comedy." They smelled blood in the water, and they moved in for the kill. There was only one problem: Their narrative of Hollywood Hubris was a leftover from another era, before cable and DVD rentals, before the rise of the overseas markets and all the other ancillary revenues with which blockbusters beefed up their box-office figures. The press was all over Last Action Hero, pronouncing it a bomb-in-the-making before it had even reached cinemas, but thanks to overseas revenues, the film ended up making $137 million. Waterworld similarly wound up making $264 million. By the time we got to Godzilla, which made $243 million worldwide, we seemed to be witnessing a new breed of movie altogether: neither a hit nor a flop, neither a blockbuster nor a bomb, but somehow both, circling the earth with the stateliness of blimps, quietly siphoning up rental revenues from Abu Dhabi; pay-per-view profits from Stockholm, Sweden; cable kick-back from Kiev, Ukraine.

Nowadays, they are everywhere: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Speed Racer, Land of the Lost, Prince of Persia, the bombs that won't go off, all of them swirling in the same dust-cloud of disappointment that in the old days would have led to them being tagged "flops," only now, thanks to Hollywood's nose for the "presold," standing a pretty decent chance of making their money back—painfully, arduously, slowly but surely. It's not pretty, but Prince of Persia is well on its way to making a small profit, thank you very much, and the same goes for most of the year's other "disappointments"—Sex and the City 2, The A-Team, The Book of Eli—all of them failing upward in the modern way.

I miss the time when we let these things die. Because I am a sicko with an overdeveloped sense of schadenfreude, yes, but also because I think that failures can be just as revealing as successes, maybe more so. One From the Heart is one of my favorite Coppola movies, as beautiful and intricate as a Faberge egg, and I'm a big fan of the bomb buried deep inside Apocalypse Now: That film's proximity to pretentiousness is exactly what makes it such a thrill. I think that Hudson Hawk is not a bad movie. I'm not so certain that Ishtar is a good movie, but it evokes the friendship between Hoffman and Beatty at a high point in both men's careers; there is something lustrous and familiar to their tomfoolery, like old friends who cannot leave a joke alone. Until Waterworld beaches itself on that supertanker with Dennis Hopper, the movie is possessed of a salty, wind-in-your-hair sense of adventure: Costner looks good against an aquamarine backdrop. And I will never turn off The Abyss when it comes on TV (not until the moment when Ed Harris comes back from the dead; then I'm outta there). James Cameron is one of the few filmmakers who regularly look as if they are going to deliver a 24-carat disaster only to make good at the last minute, thus pushing him into the company of such filmmaker-adventurers as John Huston and Howard Hawks, men for whom a movie wasn't really a movie unless it threatened to go into a life-threatening nose-dive at some point.

So yes, I will be first in line to see Inception, damp-palmed and a little nervous for Nolan, hoping he pulls magic out of the hat, grateful just for the suspense. - Tom Shone

Does disappointing summer box office have studios considering (GASP) original material?

In answer to the question posed in the headline, all I can manage is “maybe, but I wouldn’t bet anything important that the system will change.”

Box office returns are off this summer. Attendance is down 13% from last year, and even with 3D inflation pumping up a few films, overall revenue is off 7.5%. (And those numbers will probably get worse for June, thanks to the World Cup.)

So studio execs, who would like to keep their jobs, are starting to get uneasy. According to a couple reports, they’re actually uneasy enough to consider abandoning the recent reliance on sequels, proven properties and bullshit board game adaptations. Without material like that to provide movie stories, what will studios mine as raw material? Supposedly, they might actually go for original material. Should you believe it?

Vulture and Deadline are both running pieces reporting the execs from Paramount, Universal, Fox and Warner Bros. have been making frantic calls to agencies like CAA and WME, hoping to meet with agents in order to, in the words of one agency source that talked to Vulture, “Get us the original material. We need some original shit, because now our bosses are on us.”

Deadline runs a quote from one ‘major producer,’ who says,

…this sluggish summer might be a blessing in disguise for talent and producers who want to take risks but have been hamstrung for the past two years by studios that have been operating in retreat mode, and looking for the safest bets possible. The lack of originality this summer might get off this safe track and in the mindset to take some risks again, and that would be a good thing.

One of Vulture’s sources, JC Spink of the management and production company Benderspink, says more concisely,

People are feeling marketed to, as opposed to catered to…I think we’ve all gone a little bit overboard as an industry. There hasn’t been room for original material for a little while now. It’s a shame, because I don’t think it’s what anyone [who works in the business] came out here for.

(Spink was an executive producer on The Hangover. This comes, appropriately, just as CNN reports that The Hangover, a film that isn’t a license, a sequel, or a TV update, has become the most-ordered title On Demand. Actually, of the top five On Demand films only one, Twilight, sitting at #2, is an adaptation or part of a franchise.)

So that all sounds promising and ducky, and I don’t buy it for a second. Why? Because I have faith only that agents will make what seems like the best business decision and execs will make the easiest decision. This is promising on the front end, but don’t for a moment be fooled that, even if some miraculous agency/studio ‘creative confab’ bears any fruit, it means we’ll get good original movies.

Who do you think packages many of the dull, derivative big-ticket movies that have bored us all this year? Agencies and management companies. And there is no shortage of high-concept crap scripts out there just waiting for a convincing agent to foist upon a studio exec desperate to keep his job.

Beyond the talent packages that lead to big studio films, there’s another big problem that has to be addressed. The conservative and often ego-confused creative mindset at studios creates bad movies.

Could Clash of the Titans or Prince of Persia or Robin Hood have been good movies? Sure. If the first Pirates of the Caribbean can still stand as a fun, respectable summer adventure, those movies could also have turned into something worth your two hours and ten bucks. CAA could send a lost ark of original scripts printed on solid gold pages to Fox, but if the studio makes them the same way they make so many other movies, the results are still likely to stink.

And, just to leaven the pessimism a little bit, consider that this is just talking about big studio movies. There are quite a few wonderful small and indie films playing this summer — if you’re not exploring your indie and arthouse theaters you’re missing out on some great stuff. - Russ Fischer (/Film)

Are Today's Stars Easily Replaceable?

Just because you have a famous face, doesn't mean you're not expendable. An article on Jam Showbiz points out the growing trend of high profile replacements. Of course, there's Megan Fox's removal from the Transformers franchise and the Terrence Howard/Don Cheadle swap in Iron Man 2. Then there's the buzz that Kellan Lutz and Ashley Greene took things to the brink with salary demands for the Breaking Dawn films. They managed to hold on unlike the original Victoria, Rachelle Lefevre who lost her role to Bryce Dallas Howard in Eclipse. When the news of their ousting first hit the web you may have experienced distress, disappointment or perhaps just concern for the character's sake, but after the initial blow, did you ever think twice about it?

Take a look at Howard's situation. Whether it was really all about the money or not, Howard's chance to put on the War Machine suit was snatched away by Cheadle. Both are fine actors, but it's hard to let go of the guy you met in the first film, right? Wrong. When the news first arrived back in October of 2008, it came as a shock. Was there anything any movie fan could do about it? No. Was Cheadle at least a top-notch replacement? Yes. When the time finally came for Iron Man to return to theaters, I doubt most recalled the original Jim Rhodes and, if they did, it didn't make them enjoy the film any more or any less.

This provides a perfect taste of what's to come in Transformers and Eclipse's case. Fox and Lefevre are memorable faces, but certainly not irreplaceable ones. As Jam Showbiz points out, the stars of Transformers are the robots, not Shia LaBeouf. The loss of the Autobots and Decepticons would be a devastating blow, but there are a bunch of curly-haired cuties who can pick up where LaBeouf left off. The same goes for The Twilight Saga. Supporting cast members are able to reap the benefits of the franchise's success, but it's the main players -- Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner -- that hold it together.

On the other hand, the situation with the Spider-Man franchise can demolish even the biggest star's assurance. There's no reason to think that dropping Tobey Maguire and starting over would have a higher chance for success than bringing the original team back and just focusing on making film four as high quality as the first and second. So is anyone safe? How would you feel if we lost one of the boys in The Hangover in round two? If they were all replaced, probably enraged, but if Justin Bartha slid his way out and maybe Chris Pine took his spot, it'd be like getting a shot; you feel a nice jab, but within a few moments it's like nothing ever happened.

However, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis and all other series headliners have to be on alert because there's no denying that this reboot craze has the power to slide their long term deals right out from under them. The Hangover: The College Years, I can see it now. It's only been three years since the last Spider-Man film and the suits are ready to wipe the slate clean and start over. For all we know Iron Man will stop dead in its tracks and we'll have Iron Man Jr. or some nonsense coming our way. Not that the Scream vets were expecting to take the franchise beyond film three, but at least Wes Craven is giving them a proper sendoff in the new installment after which we'll be expected to latch on to the fresh faces.

It's a scary thought, but whether it's for financial reasons, personal issues or bad attitudes, everyone's disposable regardless of how famous your face is. Not everyone is as lucky as those Harry Potter kids to make it to the end of an eight-film series. Some just have to enjoy it while it lasts. - Perri Nemiroff via Cinematical

How do Movie Theaters decide which Trailers to show? (By stereotyping their audiences)

Before seeing Clash of the Titans in 3-D, filmgoers at AMC theaters must sit through previews for the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, Salt, and Step Up 3-D, among others. These films have little in common and seem intended for vastly different audiences. How do movie theaters decide which trailers to show?

The "quadrant" system. As many as six trailers play before features at major chains, like AMC and Regal. The studio releasing a given film typically has automatic rights to two of these slots, and theater executives (in consultation with higher-ups from various studios) select the remaining four. Though theoretically studios and theaters could attach any trailer to any movie, they usually decide which releases to promote by using the "quadrant" system, which divides potential audiences into four different categories: men under 25, women under 25, men over 25, and women over 25. Before chick flicks, theaters play previews for romantic dramas as well as romantic comedies, because they figure that's what young women will eventually want to see. Regal Cinemas also began matching red band trailers, which include profanity and sexually explicit scenes, with R, NC-17, and unrated movies in 2008. And sometimes theaters disregard quadrants altogether if something else ties the movies together—say, if they're all in 3-D. (It's impossible to show a 3-D trailer before a 2-D movie, since those audiences aren't wearing special glasses.)

Of course, since there are often more than four possible previews available in a given quadrant, negotiating which trailers make the cut can be tricky. The young men going to see Clash of the Titans might enjoy learning about any number of upcoming movies—Kick-Ass, The Losers, Iron Man 2—in addition to the films already being advertised before the feature. Theaters further narrow the field by trying to treat all major studios more or less equally. They might play Warner Bros. trailers on 20 percent of all screens and Disney trailers on 30 percent, for example. The same trailers don't always play before the same movie at every branch of a large chain, so it's possible to spread the wealth around.

Sometimes distributors don't want to settle for equal treatment. Every studio wants its own films to piggyback on surefire hits, regardless of quadrants. As TiVo, the cable renaissance, and the Internet have eaten away at television audiences, theatrical trailers have become more and more important as marketing tools. Moviegoers are a captive audience, after all—and studios will do whatever they can to take advantage. Though such behavior is frowned upon, executives have on occasion paid exorbitant amounts to ensure that their trailers will be well-placed, as when Sony's Jeff Blake gave a theater chain $100,000 to ensure that the trailer for The Animal, a Rob Schneider vehicle, would be shown before Universal's The Mummy Returns in 2002.

The trailer placement system at independent theaters is much simpler: They only show trailers for movies that will soon be playing on one of their screens. For these exhibitors, the calendar is the only factor at play—and sometimes, their coming attractions don't even have trailers, which simplifies things even further.

Why this whole 3D business is starting to offend us (and others)

The new Clash of the Titans hits theaters this weekend in 3D — not because the filmmakers wanted it that way, but because Warner Bros. could charge more for it. Which is just plain wrong.


Listen, Hollywood, I know that we're in a recession and theatrical attendance is down, and you're all gaga over Avatar's titanic bottom line — which was undeniably goosed by the fact that moviegoers had to pay extra to see it in 3D. But, you know, this is starting to get silly.

lash of the Titans boasts some of the worst 3D of the modern age. Remember that 3D episode of Chuck? Better than this. Why? Because it's a movie that was shot in 2D, force-converted into 3D. Again, we ask why? Greed. Not because the film would play better or look better or achieve a sensory experience unattainable on a "flat" screen. Simply so that it would make more money.


And, of course, Hollywood's in it for the greenbacks. I get that. And I don't have a philosophical problem with 3D, either. When done well — in the aformentioned Avatar, How to Train Your Dragon, Coraline, Up, even Beowulf — 3D can be a wonderfully transporting, enveloping tool. But when it's done with all the deftness of a fingerless mercenary...I call bullshit.

Have a little more respect for me, the audience. Earn my cash with glory; if you deliver unto me true spectacle, I'll gladly deliver unto you my money. But don't reach in my pocket just because you can. Or I'll...I'll...I just won't leave the house. So there.

How to win or lose on movies' box office prospects

Two companies are proposing exchanges for betting on movie box office receipts. It's similar to how investors now trade on futures for corn and other commodities.

Trend Exchange from Veriana Ventures would require higher minimum investments than the Cantor Exchange from Cantor Fitzgerald. That means movie fans and other amateurs would more likely be able to participate in Cantor's system, which would be accessible through a Web site.

In Cantor's case, a so-called hedger — such as an investor in the movie or just a fan — would sell futures contracts to a speculator valued at $1 for every $1 million in expected U.S. and Canadian ticket sales during the first month.

So if the market believes the next "Harry Potter" movie would make $175 million, a futures contract would initially go for $175. That opening price would be determined in an auction about six months before a movie's release.

That contract would trade higher and lower as expectations rise and fall. If box office estimates rise to $200 million because of good reviews closer to the movie's opening, holders of existing contracts could resell them for $200, making $25 in profit. Or a hedger could sell a new contract for $200 to a speculator.
If "Harry Potter" ends up making $250 million when the month is up, the speculator would gain $50 for every contract bought at $200. That $50 would be paid by the hedger. However, if the movie makes only $150 million, the hedger would pocket the $50 difference — paid by the speculator.

Multiple those figures by hundreds or thousands of contracts, and Hollywood investors could cover a good part of their risks.

Running out of "Movie Stars"

One of the running gags at Saturday night’s 24th annual American Cinematheque Ball was how strange it was to be honoring a movie star who hasn’t yet cracked 40. “What can you say about Matt Damon that hasn’t been said about Brendan Fraser?” roasted Jimmy Kimmel. “You’re here tonight because were running out of stars.”

He’s right. Truth is, while plenty of older stars and filmmakers deserve awards like this (Clint Eastwood routinely turns them down), Matt Damon is one of the few movie stars with the stature to command the necessary support from the studios and agencies which must wrangle clips, buy tables, line up video tributes from such pals as George Clooney (who pretended to be undergoing a prostate exam), ex-president Bill Clinton (who lauded Damon’s humanitarian work for Haiti and Water.org), Ben Stiller, et al. Damon fit the bill perfectly, boasting two studios with Damon franchises. Universal (Bourne) and Warner Bros. (Oceans) both came through, along with the Weinstein Co., Morgan Creek and WME. The best footage came from Entourage (Damon hocks Chase for a big check) and Jimmy Kimmel (Sarah Silverman’s “I’m fucking Matt Damon!”). “The worst thing I could say is, you know, Matt Damon is like, maybe he’s a perfectionist,” said Silverman.

Casey Affleck was even funnier than brother Ben: “He’s always been a guy imagining that he was a movie star who pretends to be a good guy,” Affleck said, and then displayed a strategically doctored nude photo of Damon (small black rectangle) and himself (large black rectangle). Damon turned beet red.

Among the few folks who stayed dignified in the roast atmosphere were Clint Eastwood, who directed Damon in Invictus (for which he earned a supporting actor Oscar nomination) and the upcoming Hereafter, and Paul Greengrass, who flew in from London to make the Bourne clip intro.

Damon pointed out in his hilarious acceptance speech that whenever he cracked Green Zone jokes, everyone laughed except the studio suits at the Universal table. As Damon talked about first meeting Clinton during Good Will Hunting (for which he and Ben Affleck won the screenplay Oscar), he nailed his impersonation of the president. Robin Williams thanked Damon and Affleck for giving him his “Oscar moment.”

Long-time Affleck/Damon mentor Harvey Weinstein warmly greeted the duo with a bear hug. He recently bought Affleck’s next, Company Men, and told me one of the other TWC movies he’s high on is Butter, starring Jennifer Garner.

Affleck’s wife introduced her husband as “half of one of the greatest love stories ever told, not with me,” she said, reminding that Affleck and Damon grew up together and still talk incessantly about the Red Sox. Damon’s “hetero life-mate” Affleck added that he was not receiving this award, but presenting it to the guy who would soon be playing Liberace’s boyfriend. “As some of you may know, I started out at the same time as the guy.”

In this terrific Q & A with Damon, he talks about working with the Coens on True Grit, why he and Affleck made their deal at Warner Bros., why he didn’t make Avatar and how much he looks forward to directing. In that arena, at least, Affleck is ahead of him: Damon said he has seen The Town, which Affleck directs and stars. “It’s amazing,” he said.

Ali Murtaza breaks down Hollywood Directors

Why can't someone like James Cameron create real heartfelt dramas? The answer is quite simply in the arbitrary division of directorial styles commonly used in the industry. There is the technical director and an actors director.

Quite simply put someone like Clint Eastwood, with a background in acting knows, or rather thrives on their collaboration with actors on set. They care more about the performance of the actor than the angle of the shot. It is not that these people are simply more concerned with the emotional range of an actor. In actuality they are more in tuned with it because either like Clint they have been on the other end of the camera, or they have a natural knack for dealing with actors.

On the other hand you have technical directors that know how to set up great shots and sequences that will wow the audience, but when it comes to subtlety of emotion they are at a loss. These directors can create a spectacle to be admired but cannot get the best out of their actors. They are lost in creating their world. Every once in a while they are blessed with the sense to pick great actors and that helps the process, but in the end they live in another dimension of film.

James Cameron can be categorized in the second category first and formats by Titanic, the greatest spectacle of its time. The movie blew box office and every entity that witnessed it. It starred two actors that since have made their mark in the industry. Yet, it failed to get them  an Oscar that year. 11 Academy Awards and not a single one for acting. It is clear that there was something missing in the equation. We know that it wasn't the ability of the stars. It must have been the director.

As if that wasn't enough this year we were witness to the birth of Avatar. Another revolution in film. Cameron does it once again, blows his audience away. The box office is in the billions around the world. The reactions are great. yet not even a single Oscar nomination for acting out of the nine total nominations. What is going on here? Does Cameron not have luck? What is he missing? - Ali Murtaza

Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula... DUH!

Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who studied the attention spans of subjects performing hundreds of trials. The team then converted the measurements of their attention spans into wave forms using a mathematical technique known as the Fourier transform.

They found that the magnitude of the waves increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation, which means that attention spans of the same lengths recurred at regular intervals. The same pattern has been found by Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theorist) in the annual flood levels of the Nile, and has been seen by others in air turbulence, and also in music.

Cutting made his discovery by measuring the length of every shot in 150 comedy, drama and action films, and then converted the measurements into waves for every movie. He found that the more recent the films were, the more likely they were to obey the 1/f fluctuation, and this did not just apply to fast action movies. Cutting said the significant thing is that shots of similar lengths recur in a regular pattern through the film.

Cutting believes obeying the 1/f law makes films “resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans,” and this makes them more gripping. Films edited in this way would then tend to be more successful and the style of shooting and editing more likely to be copied. Films of Cutting’s own favorite genre, the Film Noir, do not generally follow the 1/f law, with shot lengths tending to be more random. By contrast The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and the 2005 blockbuster movie Star Wars Episode III (which Cutting considers to be “just dreadful”) both follow 1/f rigidly.

The researchers concluded that over the next few decades film makers may take more care to follow the 1/f law to try to boost audience engagement.

John Hillcoat Won’t Be Going to The Promised Land; Film Scrapped Due to Financing Woes

Well, this is a lousy way to start the year. Over the last few months we’ve been watching as The Road director John Hillcoat attempted to kickstart a film adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s novel The Wettest County in the World, which evidently was to be called The Promised Land on screen. Hillcoat had a script by Nick Cave and a solid cast attached, including Ryan Gosling and Shia LaBeouf.

Now, in a piece printed in the UK, Hillcoat says the film is dead as he expresses a dismal view of the film business in general.


Hillcoat published a diary kept while making The Road in UK paper The Telegraph. (via The Playlist) There, as an epilogue to the experience of getting his latest film into theaters, he writes:

My own new project – with a much-loved script by Nick Cave and a dream all-star cast – has fallen apart. The finance company that we began The Road with has also fallen apart, having to radically downsize to one remaining staff member. The great divide has begun, with only very low-budget films being made or huge 3-D franchise films – the birth of brand films such as Barbie, Monopoly: The Movie – who knows what’s next, Coca-Cola: The Movie? I end the year appropriately – gazing into the apocalypse of my own industry.

This stings, as headlines today will also carry news of Avatar crossing the one billion dollar line. Nothing against Avatar, but if Hillcoat’s view of the business is right (”the perfect storm has arrived in Hollywood: a global economic downturn combined with piracy and the increase of downloading on the internet…The reactionary first phase has kicked in – few films in development, many films put on hold or shut down.”) then we’ll see a lot fewer films like The Promised Land in the near future.

The bright side, if you can call it that, is that Hillcoat does have other projects in the works, including an adaptation of Nick Cave’s latest novel The Death of Bunny Munro. Let’s hope one of those is deemed vaguely commercial enough to get a green light. Or maybe — just maybe — some other outfit with a few bucks to spend will swoop in and make The Promised Land happen. - Russ Fischer

Is the Hollywood Moviestar dead?

A Reuters piece that’s been making the rounds this weekend speculates that Hollywood may be thinking twice about banking on A-list celebrities in the future. The piece points to recent low-budget and star-free fare like The Hangover, District 9, and Paranormal Activity that each went on to be wildly successful, and contrasts them with big-budget, star-studded flops like A Christmas Carol, Land of the Lost, and Funny People. The overall lesson seems to be that star-power doesn’t have nearly the draw that it used to, and that budgets aren’t much of a factor for audiences either.

But of course, I don’t really think this is news to most of us. While some may bemoan the tastes of general audiences when they overwhelmingly support movies like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, I don’t think they did so for hunky Shia LaBeouf. Instead, they were probably looking to revisit the magic from the first film–which, let’s face it, was far better than it had any right to be. (Or the simpler answer, they just wanted to see things blow up.)

In any case, it was the quality of the concept of Transformers 2 (magic revisited and/or ‘splosions) that most likely led audiences showing up in droves, and not stars. You could apply a similar logic to The Hangover and its ilk mentioned above. I’d like to believe that audiences are smarter than we give them credit for—or at the very least, most can tell when studios are pushing crap on them. And sometimes they completely surprise us, just look at how well Inglourious Basterds performed.

Pronouncements of the movie star disappearing are nothing new—it’s simply something that always tends to come up after a wave of high-profile flops. I think there will always be room for stars, the lesson we need to learn is how to use them.  As the Reuters piece mentions, studios are looking to scale back on large up front salaries for big stars, and instead ask them to bank of potentially greater rewards if the film breaks even. And if some stars want to remain big-salary hogs who care more about a paycheck than their work, then perhaps it is time for them to step down.

Ultimately, the success of these lower budget features is a good thing for cinema. It makes studios less uneasy about moving forward with low budget features, and opens the doors for innovative new projects down the line. And after all, releasing several smaller features instead of relying on returns from a few big-budget films is a much safer bet for them as well.

Here's the actual article:

Hollywood rethinks use of A-list actors

Fri Nov 13, 2009 4:51pm EST

By Alex Dobuzinskis

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood studios are now thinking twice about splurging on A-list movie stars and costly productions in reaction to the poor economy, but also because of the surprising success of recent films with unknown actors.

After buddy comedy "The Hangover," a movie with a little known cast, made $459 million at global box offices this past summer, several films have shown that a great concept or story can trump star appeal when it comes to luring fans.

"District 9," a low budget movie in which the biggest stars were space aliens treated like refugees and the lead actor was South African Sharlto Copley, made $200 million. Thriller "Paranormal Activity," starring Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat, has cash registers ringing to the tune of $100 million.

Next up, on November 20, comes Summit Entertainment's relatively low-budget ($50 million) franchise movie "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," a sequel to 2008 hit vampire romance "Twilight" which made global stars of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. Online ticket sellers report "New Moon" is one of their highest pre-sale movies of all time, and box office watchers expect the film to have a smash opening.

"Nobody says that a big wonderful movie needs to be expensive, it's just that that's been the trend, and perhaps the trend is misguided," said University of Southern California cinema professor Jason E. Squire.

Last weekend, comic actor Jim Carrey's "A Christmas Carol" became the latest celebrity-driven movie to stumble at box offices, opening to a lower-than-expected $30 million. Aside from Jim Carrey and "Carol," which cost at least $175 million, A-listers who suffered box office flops recently have included Bruce Willis ("Surrogates"), Adam Sandler ("Funny People"), Will Ferrell ("Land of the Lost"), Eddie Murphy ("Imagine That") and Julia Roberts ("Duplicity").


"The (major movie) machine didn't fly last summer, if you look at the movies and the names, they were not star-driven movies, they really weren't," said Peter Guber, chairman of Mandalay Entertainment and former head of Sony Pictures. Hollywood insiders say A-listers currently are having trouble with salary demands in the $15 million range or participation approaching 20 percent of gross profits -- deals that were once somewhat common for top talent. Instead, they are being asked to take less money upfront and greater compensation only if a film breaks even.

FRANCHISE ON THE CHEAP

In "New Moon," actors Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart rekindle their romance between an immortal vampire and a high school girl that they brought to silver screens in last year's adaptation from Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" books.

At the time, Pattinson and Stewart were unknown stars but that did not hurt "Twilight," which made $384 million at global box offices and gave Summit a bona fide franchise.  It's not unusual for franchises like the "Harry Potter" movies to begin with unknown actors, but as the films' popularity takes root, production budgets relax and actor, producer and other salaries soar.

But in recent years, Hollywood has been racked by the recession, competition from videogames and the Web, declining DVD sales and fewer licensing deals with television networks. This week, Disney chief Bob Iger said in a conference call that the sluggish DVD market is one reason the major studio has altered its moviemaking. "It causes us to really reconsider not only what we're investing in our films, but how we market them and how we distribute them," he said.

For its part, fledgling Summit has positioned "Twilight" as a franchise for the recession era by keeping the pressure on the costs for "New Moon," and Hollywood producers are praising them for it. "Good for them, they are really keeping the costs down. It is unusual," said Lauren Shuler Donner, a producer on the "X-Men" films and 2008's "The Secret Life of Bees." Summit, whose executives declined to be interviewed, took a page from the playbook of "The Lord of the Rings" by shooting the second and third films back-to-back this summer.

When director Peter Jackson made his three "Lord of the Rings" films simultaneously 10 years ago, it was a novel idea that reduced costs because actors, sets, costumes, locations and other items only had to be assembled and paid for once.

Similarly, by shooting the next two "Twilight" movies together, Summit kept the cost of the third film, "Eclipse," due out June 30, around $60 million, one source said. "What I like is they didn't have a long window (between films), they went in to make a franchise, they didn't go in to see if they had a franchise," said Warren Zide, producer on the "American Pie" and "Final Destination" movies.

More Distro Chaos

Presented with the option of buying a film on disc or just renting it, it practically goes without saying that springing to purchase a a film sight unseen must happen far less regularly than just plumping for a hire. This situation will also be exacerbated by Netflix-style postal services and VOD. It isn’t any wonder, then, that the studios are considering a plan that would give sell-through discs a window of their own, a protected chance to tempt consumers into a more profitable course of consumerism. I’ve read a report from The LA Times (found courtesy of Screen Rant) in which Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is quoted as having made the following claim during a conference call: "The studios are wrestling with declines in DVD sales while the DVD rental market has been modestly growing. One of the mitigating steps some are considering is introducing a DVD retail sales-only window for a few weeks."

Already, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. have pulled their discs and gone to court with Redbox, the $1-a-night robo-kiosk people. The studios argue that Redbox are devaluing the product at that price, and they may have a point. As a collectormaniac consumer, I’d love to see the prices on both rental and retail discs continue to drop (and drop and drop) but as a film lover, I’d hate for this to create a climate of fear that sees the studios less willing to invest in risky (read: not utterly banal) films.

Dare I dream of a future world in which the studios have become extinct and the film culture is no longer shackled to profit and investment but the labour-of-love work of people settling for reasonable wages and looking to express themselves? Imagine a world where a film director earns, say, $90,000 for a year’s work and an actor bags $45,000 for a four week stint on set. It’s bizarro economics, and might sound more like a burger joint than the supposed dream factory of Hollywood but it is films getting made, and I’m sure just as many of them would be good. Can we even fantasise the film industry as existing in a completely different strata of the economy? And if not, why not?

Back to the rental question. Hastings has identified a silver lining to the proposed rental delay, and related it in the same call: "If we can agree on low-enough pricing, delayed rental could potentially increase profits for everyone."

And for the consumer? A greater tendency to borrow discs from friends maybe and perhaps even a huge rise in piracy. Time will tell. - Brendon Connelly

Industry Gives Hollywood Film Festival Free Pass

I am surprised by the film industry and the media’s continued willingness to give a free pass to entrepreneur Carlos de Abreu’s Hollywood Film Festival, a cannily constructed facade which honors stars, filmmakers and craftspeople and lines the pockets of de Abreu.

He’s created an awards show timed perfectly at the height of the awards season, which he presents inside the context of a film festival. While it is not considered to be a bonafide quality film fest curated by top programmers, like Telluride, Sundance or New York, and its premieres are often less than stellar, Hollywood players participate because it supports the award cause. It gives vying award season contenders yet another opportunity to grab attention. If de Abreu gives an award, why wouldn’t any self-respecting self-promoting player show up for their five minutes of PR? This years award winners include Hilary Swank (Amelia), Robert DeNiro (Everybody’s Fine) and Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds).

Having served as a second lieutenant in the Air Force in Mozambique before being forced out of the country in 1975 by the communist regime, de Abreu came to Hollywood after he got tired of being a marketing director for the jeweler Cartier. He studied screenwriting at UCLA. He got a foothold in the film industry by putting on conferences every two months to let screenwriters pitch Hollywood buyers. He started giving out the Hollywood Screenplay Discovery Awards, and co-wrote with Howard Smith a book for Random House called Opening the Door to Hollywood. He sent scripts to agencies, and in 1996 Ted Kotcheff optioned two of the winners’ screenplays.

De Abreu got involved with the internet in 1994, started a website, and collected over 3000 domain names, all related to Hollywood, including the Hollywood Film Festival, which he launched in 1996. Married to TV actress Janice Pennington (The Price is Right), de Abreu worked his way up the Hollywood social ladder, throwing dinner parties and becoming friendly with the likes of Kotcheff, Mark Rydell, Sherry Lansing and Mike Medavoy (a Hollywood Film Award winner for the flop All the King’s Men).

While de Abreu took advantage of his social contacts with agents and studio heads when he mounted the festival, it wasn’t taken seriously until he hired the powerhouse PR firm PMKHBH (now he hires different agencies every year) and in 2002 brought on their client, respected producer Paula Wagner, a former CAA agent, as his co-chair. Her producing partner Tom Cruise then attended the screening of their presentation Narc. After Cruise, many more stars such as Harrison Ford followed him down the red carpet, either as presenters or award winners. They include Clint Eastood, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelina Jolie, Steven Spielberg, Nicole Kidman, Ron Howard, George Lucas, Diane Keaton, John Travolta, Goldie Hawn, Naomi Watts, Warren Beatty, Jennifer Aniston, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro, Nic Cage and Benicio del Toro.

De Abreu moved the festival from October to August and back to October again to best capitalize on the awards season. He recognized that if you give someone who is campaigning for an Oscar an award, they will come. That was all he had to do.

The actual programming of some 80 films tends to be light also-rans left over from other fests. The screenings serve as a backdrop for the big awards night (this year, October 26) when everyone walks the red carpet to accept their prize. De Abreu admits that he can do whatever he pleases, with no oversight.

There is no organization, no philanthropic goal behind the Hollywood Film Festival, beyond de Abreu’s stated hope that he is bridging the gap between established Hollywood and emerging talent. This festival is a business enterprise, selling tickets, VIP passes, sponsorships (this year, Starz) and studio tables. How much money does it make? De Abreu tells no one.

Memo To Hollywood: Rip-Off, Don't Remake

With news of another CJ7 and Masi Oka's new Defenders coming on the heels of the (relative) failure of Terminator Salvation and (complete) failure of Land Of The Lost, we're left wondering: Are stealth reboots are the way to go?

Maybe we're jumping to conclusions. After all, Star Trek shows that audiences clearly don't have a problem with every franchise makeover that offers itself to them on a CGI-laden, lens-flared platter.

But we couldn't help but notice that Masi Oka's new project about videogamers who end up saving the world after it turns out that the game is more than just a game is oddly reminiscent of 1984 movie The Last Starfighter (in which a video-gamer saves the universe after it turns out that the game is more than just a game) in the same way that Stephen Chow's cute alien movie is "reminiscent" of ET (Oh, wait; he admitted that that was a rip-off). While it's arguably true that there are no new stories anymore, the similarities between these "new" movies and the 1980s originals have gotten us wondering whether ripping off cult favorites is the way forward for Hollywood's nostalgia-struck executives.

Think about it: With all the sequels, remakes and adaptations of much-beloved comics and television shows that make up the summer blockbuster slate these days, it'd be too much to ask for some genuine originality from anyone other than the animators - and, worse, we could end up with something worse than G-Force if they tried - but remaking movies with the serial numbers filed off gives moviemakers the chance to indulge their desire to relive their childhoods without risking the wrath of fans of the same childhood shows, movies and comics they want to revisit. Sure, you lose the brand recognition, but that's a double-edged sword these days: Who's to say that Terminator Salvation wouldn't have been more successful if it hadn't had the weight of the first two movies on its celluloid shoulders?

I'm not suggesting that we wish for a world where everything is Transmorphers instead of Transformers, but I can't help but wonder whether Defenders and CJ7 point to a new middle ground that would allow everyone to keep their sacred cows idealized in memory yet relive them in new forms, unencumbered by expectation, preconception and nostalgia. Put it this way: You don't want to watch a new Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie without Joss Whedon, but would you be that against a new movie about a teenage girl fighting monsters if she had a different name? - Graeme McMillan