Want it complex, stimulating or subtle? Don't bother!
The Studios have no room for The Smarts
Is this actually Part 3 of a multi-parter that I’ve been ranting on the last few days?
Enter hot. Might as well end one year and begin again in a way that might get our love and desire for the fight up, right?
Remember how just the other day, you and I were discussing how TheFKATheFilmBiz could not embrace long term thinking? Like thinking past the immediate was some sort of block? We can’t seem to do what we need to do to get us back on track. Remember how we reached the conclusion that it was this failure that led us to a world where America is incapable of making films for grown-ups? It wasn’t always that way, was it?
“Movies for grown-ups” show up on most corporations’ launch strategy but once those companies take in that big outside financing chunk you see them pivot towards The IP Lean: Big. Recognizable. Franchises.
And yeah, I am saying this in Peak Award Season. The glut of The Serious. The time of year when all the distributors do the same thing, overspend on a popularity contest that masquerades as a dance of excellence. They release the films that emote at eleven. The ones with subjects of “significance”. Everyone doing the same thing so that no one can accuse the other of being an effin idiot. I know because I once was paid to do that same thing, and I sure had some fun. I wasn’t about to let a good op to put some better films on top of a #ToWatch list.
Okayokay, they do make some room occasionally for “original”; they have to keep up appearances after all, but they are always going to trend towards the big, loud, story world sort of thing nowadays. This ain’t a cheap game to get in on; they know they have to ante up.
And yes, the international gatekeepers’ House of The Auteur has some sway with those of oh-so cultivated elevated taste. We can count on the EU film festival circuit to give us enough movies to have a film a week that might appeal to those aspirational high nose sniffing sorts. And I carry my ID card proudly in that crowd, and thus can proclaim out loud that there just isn’t enough supply of movies for grown-ups now that the Americans have left the field.
It’s not like the other countries aren’t trying. More and more arthouse festival films are being made in the English language regardless of where they come from. It is a clear business decision to help the films both travel and breakthrough in the English-speaking markets, while simultaneously helping the fat cats funding them save some pretty green from shooting elsewhere than the soil that has (intentionally?) priced itself out of one its most lucrative industries (that’s America and our cinema industry I’m talking about again). American films for grown ups won’t have the room to come back home any time soon; we’ve pushed them away and they are more appreciated elsewhere.
What do you expect? When the competition has quit the game, someone somewhere is going to come in and pick up the slack. But it needs to be fueled. And we could have done that. America could have had a cinema culture that didn’t dumb us all down. The platforms didn’t need to surrender every inch of their real estate to mindless ambient drivel. And we didn’t need to kill off our private equity sector in the process. Was it just that the power hoarders were asleep at the wheel? Or was ending sophisticated cinema part of their secret strategy all along…?
Before you get bogged down or go digging for a conspiracy, make no mistake: this is a great business opportunity we now have.
