Skip to main content

Prestige Pictures

Dirty Harry asks What Happened To The Prestige Picture? and has an answer:

When you look at the best Picture nominees of the last three years it’s astounding to realize that of the 15 nominations, only three cracked the $100 million mark — two by a whisker. The average box office gross of the 2006 nominees was $59 million; in 2005 it was $49 million. Another way to look at it is that 98% of the population just wasn’t interested. 

While there’s still plenty of prestige films left to be released in 2007, as of now things are looking even worse: Michael Clayton, In The Valley of Elah, Lust Caution, Sicko, The Brave One, Eastern Promises, Into The Wild, The Darjeeling Limited, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, have each been, or are looking to be, very expensive flops… Or, are they?

To call these films failures is fair in the sense that audience indifference is quite spectacular, but not when you take into account that audience reaction had little or nothing to do with their conception. Prestige films are no longer produced for public consumption by moguls eager to feed a public hungry for smart challenging stories –instead they’re produced by Hollywood for Hollywood, and to impress critics, festival-goers, and awards’ judges. It’s easy to blame this shift on an American people eager to see their Transformers, but in fact it’s Hollywood that’s changed.

Nice post, interesting points.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I (Briefly) Try a Mac

 I Bought a Mac. My first computer was an Atari 800, fully loaded with 48k of RAM. And I mean the original, beige model, not its low-slung, fancy successor. My friend went for an Apple IIe, which cost a relative fortune. Eventually, I’d step up to an Atari 1040ST, while he’d get a IIgs. And even more eventually, we both ended up with IBM PC compatibles. MSDOS was my friend, Unix an ally. It was with great reluctance that I transition from a command-line interface (CLI) to a Graphic User Interface (GUI), always on a PC platform and never a Mac. I never bought into the hype and never experienced all the horrid things that allegedly befell anyone using a PC. For me, they just worked. Yet here I am, these many decades later, typing this on a brand-new MacBook Air M4. How things change... Initially, there was little regret but a mounting list of frustrations. Adjusting to the keyboard isn’t too hard, it’s just a matter of experimentation. Learning how to scale the display wasn’t awful, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dune Part 2 (2024)

I have come not to praise Dune but to bury it. I am in a distinct minority. So be it. To explain why, there will be some minor spoilers ahead; sorry. The short version is #NotMyDune. Summary: Picking up where Dune Part 1 left off, we find the young Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) hanging out with the Fremen. Plots to overthrow rival houses and empires ensue. Go here to see what I thought about Dune Part 1 (2021) . Overall, I found it to be technically brilliant, but lacking a human heart, an exercise in frenetic slow motion. D2 is more of the same, though with far more action. Acting-wise, everyone is doing a fine, more than adequate job. Absolutely no one or nothing stands out. The way the characters are written (adapted, actually), their back and forths and interactions, are all weak and unengaging. I generally hate when they speak. I've read the novel a ridiculous number of times, and these films are prompting me to read it again. I understand that trying to translate the n...
1 comment
Read more

Have I mentioned I saw Monsters vs. Aliens?

It’s possible that Pixar is becoming a blight on the world of animation. Yes, they do some really great work ( The Incredibles , Ratatouille ), but they’ve also done some clunkers ( Cars , Wall-E ). Their greatest sin, though, is that they apparently radiate a variation of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, so that any other animated film – especially if done with CG – is automatically judged inferior. There is some justification to this, but you don’t see every live action film being compared to, say, the films of Ingmar Bergman (well, except by brooding people wearing dark glasses sitting in dim coffee shops smoking clove cigarettes discussing cinema, damn you ). In the traditional film world, it’s accepted that different artists turn out different products. In the animated world, everyone is supposed to match or surpass Pixar, or so it seems. Needless to say, that’s just a crock. Monsters vs Aliens is to your typical Pixar production as Spielberg is to Scorsese. And I h...
2 comments
Read more