In the same way, I’d argue that people who limit their reading to detective novels or the Harry Potter series are missing something if they don’t essay Tolstoy, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Joyce. “Studio people actually said to me, ‘Don’t bring me anything that’s good, because I’ll be tempted to buy it, and I can’t.’ ” “That’s when corporate timidity gave way to terror,” he said. Whereas the ‘Harry Potter’ series and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy weren’t great movies, but they were very satisfying.” The director Billy Ray traced the phenomenon to the economic collapse of 2008, and to the decline of the DVD market. Kramer’ was a really good movie, but it’s not satisfying to a global audience. A generation ago, execs made movies that they wanted to see. One studio head told me, “Movies may not have gotten better over the years, but they’ve gotten more satisfying. Extravagant computer-generated imagery is the hallmark of blockbusters that are carefully formulated to avoid being “execution dependent” or “review sensitive”-to avoid needing to be good.
What plays best of all, of course, is a spaceship going kablooey all over the screen. Comedy, horror, and triumphs of the human spirit still play better in theatres than at home. We go to the movies now for the same reasons that Romans went to the Colosseum: to laugh, to scream, and to cheer.
#Orcs must die 3 colosseum movie
Movie theatres are no longer where we go for stories about who we are. The average teen-ager, the moviegoer of the future, sees six films a year in the theatre. As I noted in a comment on the Stephen Fry post, some of the Hollywood studio execs in the article say that movies like the great ones of the recent past just wouldn’t get made any more: But I would claim two things.įirst, maybe people are missing something in their penchant for blockbusters movies-a kind of gratification that you get not from watching people being blown up, but by watching people live their normal, difficult lives, and stepping into their shoes. (I have enjoyed some of the Pixar movies!) To each their own. I have no objection to the existence of movies like the “Mad Max”, “Batman,” or “Jurassic Park” series, though I don’t go see them. (Yes, that’s my personal judgement.) It’s now all about getting people to come to movie theaters when there’s a whole bunch of competing stuff they can see on the Internet. And the piece really does show that although Hollywood has always produced some blockbusters (in the past, they were movies like “Ben-Hur” and “The Robe”, or even some cowboy movies), there’s a very real decline in higher quality stuff. It’s about the uphill attempt of one man, Adam Fogelson, to buck the trend by creating a new studio to make non-blockbuster movies (what I’d call “good” movies).
But the turn of Hollywood to reliably profitable “action” movies is a real phenomenon, and I recommend that readers have a look at an engrossing new piece in The New Yorker, “ The Mogul of the Middle” by Tad Friend (access free). In my post on Stephen Fry, several readers took issue with my claim that Hollywood was being taken over by blockbuster action movies, usually connected with franchises, and that was a sign of declining standards.
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