When you’re up at oh dark thirty in the morning and obsessed with articles dating back five years, you might have to seriously reconsider your ability to think about things rationally. But insomnia aside there is a strange correlation with sleep deprivation and creativity. Not that it is really intelligible the next morning but damn does it feel good at the time. Having said that I am here wondering if there is anything that is still new left to create. Have all the great characters and stories been told already. Or is greatness at least partially defined by a level of non-commercial success.
Innovation, risk, experimentation, and darkness…. Four simple words, yet in Hollywood they seem to be taboo. Sometimes they let risk be a factor or innovation but god forbid both. Now I know that sounds snarky but how many ORIGINAL properties are coming out this year. It’s not as bad as the year of sequels we just had, but it is almost all adaptations of pre-established franchises or successes. Yes there is a level of safety when using the known commodity but what about the Star Wars for this generation. With the exception of sequels where are the new properties that are destined to be breakout hits or groundbreaking phenomenons.
Ranting aside now… to be fair there have been several original ideas that have come our way. Some less then original then others but regardless they have the virtue of being new. I have found that I don’t want to go to the movies like I used to. I was an avid moviegoer as recently as two years ago. What happened? Commercialism. Product placement, product tie-ins, merchandising, trailers… wait did I say trailers. Yes one of the big problems with today’s market is trailers.
Why might you ask? Well the truth is trailers are getting better. Why is this bad? Because they are becoming misleading, to use a too often used metaphor they are like sheep calling wolf too many times. The problem is trailers are intentionally packing their product into two minutes of hype. Often times using footage from the final few minutes of the movie to grab the money shots and stuff them into an enticing package. This is a double-edged sword; on one hand the trailers will bring in audiences. But the bad is that nine times out of ten they will be waiting for that moment they really loved from the trailer and as they wait they begin to realize it is the climax of the story. Suddenly the movie looses all momentum and its dazzle is diminished.
So they walk out of the theater with a less then stellar point of view. Even if they thoroughly enjoyed the movie that sense of let down taints their opinion. When they tell their friends who want to go see it they give a non-committal response. This escalates into a vicious cycle as the company sees profits going down so they use their marketing engine to come up with better and better ways to entice the potential viewer. The result, tickets sales are going down and prices are going up. At this rate I believe that movie theaters will become as novel as actual theaters in less then a generation.
How can this be rectified? Well first I think Hollywood should start looking outside of commercial successes and find those people with creativity and talent that have no way to get their foot in the metaphorical door. Second I think trailers should be teasers and nothing more. They should show moments from the first two acts of the movie only and leave the third act completely unseen by the public. Yes this may diminish the spectacle of some trailers but it could ultimately restore the general reaction of patrons who get to see more then they bought their tickets for.
But whatever happens there is one really positive note. With the plethora of comic book movies coming up there has to be a healthy amount of new blood in the form of geeks entering Hollywood. Perhaps they can turn this ship around before it capsizes over the falls at the edge of the earth.
