Escape was the theme once again for U.S. moviegoers last weekend-but don’t blame the audiences.
Escape has been the theme for U.S. moviegoers for several months now, but audiences aren’t avoiding attending good, serious films; Hollywood is avoiding making them.
The newly released, highly derivative thriller Obsessed finished first at the U.S. office this past weekend, bringing in a surprising $28.5 million. That’s twice what industry analysts had expected and a good deal more than the film’s relatively low $20 million production budget.
It’s also emblematic of a central problem facing Hollywood today: the decline of serious drama.
First-weekend audiences for Obsessed were undoubtedly swelled by the presence of singer Beyonce and the prospect of a catfight between her and homewrecker Ali Larter (Heroes). Undoubtedly the film did not disappoint in that regard.
Also surely interesting for many viewers were the racial angles to the film, which add some small amount of flavor to an overripe story line. Critics and social advocates used to complain that black characters were too often shown as villains or subservient in media portrayals, which was true. Today the opposite habit is the fashion, and it is just as unthinking and stereotypical as its predecessor.
The previous week’s box-office champion, the lighthearted Zak Efron comedy 17 Again, finished second this time, while another genre film, Fighting, opened at number 3. The earnest Jamie Foxx drama The Soloist came in fourth, bringing in less than the studio would have hoped. That follows the lack of success of recent dramas such as State of Play and Duplicity.
Analysts have blamed these poor performances on audiences’ unwillingness to watch serious films, especially because people tend to want to escape from their problems during economic hard times.
I think that’s not the case at all. The reality is that Hollywood’s theatrical film wing has largely forgotten how to do good dramas, and the central problem is the ever-greater politicization of Tinseltown in recent years.
Comedies, action movies, and other genre films have been largely free of the incursion of left-wing politics, due both to their genre expectations and the audiences to which they’re pitched, especially the young, who are less energized by politics. And those films are doing very well.
Dramas, on the other hand, aimed as they are at more mature audiences, have been entirely overtaken by progressive politics. The poor box office performance of the numerous dreary and politically slanted antiwar films of the past few years exemplify this trend, as do the numerous tracts against bourgeois normality and for sexual radicalism and other outlier attidudes evident in Milk, The Reader, Transamerica, and other such filmic delights of the past couple of years.
The occasional Christian-oriented film such as Fireproof or nonpolitical drama such as The Pursuit of Happyness does very well at the box office, but Hollywood has largely killed serious drama by insisting on equating it with progressive politics.
Why? Flush with money from the nonpolitical genre fare, the studios are content to allow their big stars, directors, and other key players to establish their progressive artistic, political, and, yes, sexual bona fides for the progressive elites by making these politicized dramas audiences don’t want to watch.
That means these sorts of films will continue to be made as long as the studios continue to do well overall and the nation’s elites remain repugnantly leftist—but it doesn’t make it right.
—S. T. Karnick
Thanks for the comment, Fortunato. Hollywood’s number one concern used to be money, and creative people accepted that, even though often reluctantly. That is in fact what has changed: a profit is guaranteed, which allows things other than serving audiences to come to the fore. And the most important of these by far is politics.
The problem I think is not just one of politics; it’s that good drama requires good writing and, let’s face it, the best American writers are all working for TV and they don’t want to quit. Why should they? Having one out of dozen scripts filmed every ten years, after so many modifications by executives “who know what people want” that it’s unrecognizable to the very man/woman who penned it? No way.
Also, good dramas require good directing. Unfortunately, most of the best American directors are doing indie flicks and they don’t want to quit. It’s not difficult to understand why. Bigger budgets and superstars aren’t much if you are under constant surveillance of the aforementioned executives or, even worse, taught your own job by the twenty-something hearthrob whose colgate smile is guaranteed to bring viewers in and who also happens to be your producer.
Finally, good dramas require – no, NEED – good acting. The problem is, many of the best American actors around look like neither Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie and they don’t want to visit the surgeon as they happen to believe talent is the most important thing to an actor. Hollywood disagrees, and what Hollywood gets is hunks and hot chicks who can’t do drama (nor anything else but showing their pretty faces, for that matter) while the best American actors do television, theater or… indie flicks.
Finally, good dramas (and, actually, good films of any kind) require you respect your audience and refrain to dumbing-down your product to make it accessible to the five-month-old. In short, you must not take viewers for cretins, which Hollywood precisely does – and the amount of money it makes suggest they may not be that wrong after all.
So the problem as I see it is the following: either Hollywood grows up and gives up on its short-term, money-money-money vision or it keeps making films that (sometimes) make money but are innocuous at “best” and will be forgotten next week or, in some days, next minute. Tinseltown, the choice is yours.
You’re quite right, Joe. Gran Torino is a superb film, and the powerful contempt it displays for contemporary leftist shibboleths was a strong element of its audience appeal, I believe. I would have thought it outrageous that the film did not receive at least a nomination for the Best Picture Oscar if the Oscars hadn’t so blatantly corrupt and biased over the past decades as to become entirely irrelevant.
A good article, S.T. I think that one recent drama that bucked the trend that you described was Gran Torino, which I saw. It was the first time I went to the movies in over a year & I went w/my brother & nephews & we all enjoyed it. Otherwise, there hasn’t been anything before or since to entice me to pay a $10 ticket + concession prices.