Film discourse has an uncanny fixation on money
“Digger,” Tom Cruise’s unexpected return to arthouse flicks, bombed with a $7.5 million domestic opening to its $160 million budget. “Forgotten Island,” the first mainstream animated film to feature Filipino mythology and culture, disappointed with just $38 million worldwide (as of writing) to its $80 million budget.
On one hand, “Digger” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s exploration into environmental degradation at the hands of corporate greed has largely been overshadowed by the headline of Cruise’s worst box-office performing film.
And several YouTubers and social media content creators have already dismissed “Forgotten Island” as a box-office bomb (despite rave reviews) and cited it as evidence for studios to move away from original scripts in favor of known franchises and sequels.
There is no definitive metric for what is considered a good movie—not even its box-office performance. So why are we so fixated on the numbers?
Why the fixation on performance?
Box-office numbers are measured for a reason. Aside from being the obvious standard for evaluating profitability, it is how studios and producers study the market—it informs them of what works and what doesn’t.
Even in the age of streaming, where some films find a second life after their theatrical release, streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, and Prime don’t exactly disclose viewing statistics per title, leaving box-office statistics as the only publicly available metric for a film’s success.
In a Hot Ones interview with Sean Evans, Matt Damon shared how the industry pivoted to emphasize sure-hits amid the streaming era:
“DVDs were a huge part of the revenue stream. Technology has made that obsolete. Movies that we used to make—we could afford to not make all our money when it played in the theater, because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.
When that went away, that changed the type of movies we make. The idea of making $100 million on a love affair between these two people—I love everyone in the movie, but that’s suddenly a massive gamble in a way that it wasn’t in the 1990s when they were making those kinds of movies.”
In other words, because of the lack of a secondary market, studios and filmmakers are forced to prioritize box-office hits, visibly reducing variety in the types of films we get to see.
The cost problem
But that’s just one side of the coin. The demand for quality movies will forever be there, but consumers aren’t so quick to spend on a ticket anymore—particularly when they can wait for a few months and simply watch on their already paid-for streaming service.
Where does theater stand then? Spectacle. Sure, ticket prices—well, prices in general—have risen across the board but films such as “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” “The Odyssey,” and even “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” have all crossed $1 billion worldwide.
Simply put, there’s a willingness to spend on the right movies, but even the right movie is often few and far between. Like studios and filmmakers, audiences have also lost the ability to experiment with what they watch. Save the guaranteed spectacles for the theater; keep those you can afford to wait for at home.
Leave the metrics to someone else
It’s an issue with no clear solution. Studios and producers are simply following the money, while consumers act on logical outcomes. But if there’s any way out of this profit-minded approach to movies, it’s to find the middle ground at risk.
Because while studios still continue to jeopardize hundreds of millions on original stories, consumers must also throw in a similar bet and risk the price of a few tickets on something new—regardless of early reviews and box-office numbers. The moment we let how people spend their money affect the type of movies we watch, it turns the movie experience into a race for replicable results rather than creative exploration.
We can’t call for original stories and then simply turn the other cheek the moment they’re released. There’s unfortunately no going around it. There’s a price for creative expression, and we too have to pay for it.
******
Get real-time news updates: inqnews.net/inqviber
