The mainstream movie industry is in trouble. That’s the conventional wisdom. That’s what venerated directors like Stevens Soderbergh and Speilberg have forecast will happen in an environment where studios would rather spend hundreds of millions of dollars on one-size-fits-all summer tentpoles than diversify their outputs. That’s what can be guessed from a summer that saw several big-budget star vehicles (The Lone Ranger, White House Down, After Earth) fizzle at the box office and several others just scrape by. And if this summer gave any studio execs pause, a year like 2015 may have them shaking in their tailored suits, with twenty-plus blockbuster-sized movies with blockbuster-sized budgets scheduled for release.
There’s other conventional wisdom, of course, wisdom which says that modern movies can make up for poor domestic showings by crushing it overseas. It’s no secret that Hollywood is taking foreign markets very seriously these days, but they’re not the panacea they appear to be. Many countries have policies in place to ensure that as much money as possible that gets spent there stays there, and American studios get a much smaller cut of box office revenue abroad than they would at home. In his book The Hollywood Economist, Howard J. Epstein puts the movie studio’s take of foreign box office receipts at around 40%, less after expenses.
So the industry is in trouble. Option one is to panic. If the blockbuster model becomes unstable, it may not last long enough to give us Iron Man 5 or split the final Hobbit movie into a couple more flicks. For those who would be all too happy to let the bottom fall out from the industry responsible for Smurfs 2 and After Earth, option two may seem more palatable: wait and let it happen. After all, it’s not as though quality movie-making has stopped. Good directors kicked out of the Hollywood machine are just finding new ways to get their movies financed and made, and much of the most interesting programming is coming out on television anyway.
Still, it’s hard not to miss a time when Hollywood made movies worth seeing, when spending an hour-and-a-half at the local Cineplex was actually more appealing than spending the same amount of time surfing YouTube. Intrepid movie fans can still find good stuff, but they have to hunt for it. This brings us to option three: don’t just wait for the fall of the blockbuster movie industry, but root for it. A complete implosion might be just what Hollywood needs to kick it back into gear.
This isn’t the first time the mainstream movie industry has threatened to collapse in on itself. It happened most recently, and most instructively, in the 1960s and early 70s, when television was making enormous inroads into box office returns, Hollywood stars were refusing to play by the studio’s rules, and foreign pictures out of Italy, England, and France were proving that there were actually audiences for movies that dared to examine naughty subjects like sex, violence, and non-continuous editing. For a major movie studio executive, it was an exciting, terrifying time to be alive.
The Hollywood of the fifties and sixties operated much like the Hollywood of today. Threatened by alternatives to movie-going, most notably television, large studios poured their energy into creating massive, expensive epics that had to be seen on the big screen to be appreciated. The idea was to make movies that offered things television couldn’t, like color photography and wide-screen picture. Expensive ‘event’ movies, of course, had always been part of the industry’s strategy; Hollywood had sunk plenty of money into both producing and marketing, for example, visually decadent movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) and Gone with the Wind (1939). But such movies had previously been made only sparingly. Before World War II, around one to two movies per year got the big budgets and enormous marketing pushes that marked them as proto-blockbusters. By the sixties, it was ten to fifteen. The uptick in big-budget extravaganzas couldn’t sustain itself, and following notable flops like Cleopatra (1963), Dr. Doolittle (1968), and Hello Dolly (1969), Hollywood knew it was in trouble.
They got themselves out of it by doing things they would have never done if they weren’t desperate. Threatened with bankruptcy, Hollywood opened its doors to untested directors like Steven Speilberg, Martin Scorcese, and Robert Altman, and allowed them to make violent, messy, openly critical films that would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. It paid off gloriously. Movies like The Graduate (1967) and M*A*S*H (1970) each cost under $5 million to produce, and each made back their budgets many, many times over. In this period, Hollywood actually made money by being different, edgy, and taking chances.
Obviously, that didn’t last. The studios were eventually bought out by conglomerates eager to get a piece of the suddenly lucrative film industry. In 1977, Star Wars came along to show an eager world how much money could be made from movie merchandising, and suddenly it was harder to sell scripts that couldn’t readily be spun off into a line of action figures. Major studios became more interested in movies that stuck to a formula known to make money and less in those that did things that had never been done. Slowly, they turned their attention to producing homogenized spectacles capable of wowing audiences on opening weekend and not much caring about what happened to them afterward. Which brings us to today, with producers unwilling to take a chance on a movie not purged of any idiosyncrasy that might confuse global audiences, of any movie not based off an already-popular book, TV show, municipal code subsection, or what-have-you.
That’s the way it is, but if the industry is threatened financially, it doesn’t have to be that way forever. Imagine if the situation got bad enough for Hollywood execs to become desperate. Where would they turn? Perhaps to television, where people like Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad) and Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) have been putting out popular, thought-provoking entertainments on a weekly basis for years. It’s easy to get excited thinking about what talents like theirs could do on the big screen. Or perhaps they would bring people like the beleaguered Steven Soderbergh, who’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra was rejected by multiple movie studios before becoming a ratings smash for HBO, back into the fold.
And of course there’s all the undiscovered talent we won’t know about until they’re given a chance. The idea of the mainstream Hollywood film industry breaking itself down and building itself back up better than it was before is an optimistic one. One massive hit can replenish a studio’s coffers, and restore their faith in the big damn blockbuster model of filmmaking, for years at a time. But it’s an attractive idea for movie lovers. The history is there, and maybe it’s high time it repeat itself.
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