Some things just boggle me.
Occasionally I read The Smoking Gun, because the site takes online investagative reporting to a whole new level. I like them because they show you their papertrail and stick to documentable facts. Also, because the level of snark on that site is beautiful. Today, I came across an interesting article that documents the budgets of M. Night Shyamalan's recent trail of blockbuster movies.
I went through them all and zoned out at the numbers. More than three 0's and my brain shuts down and refuses to comprehend it as anything other than 'a lot'. What was interesting about the docs was that they're the budget, not the actual expenditures. This is just the list of numbers the movie was approved to spend, not what it actually did spend. They very well might be one and the same, but they could be radically different.
A group of friends and I write really bad movies to blow off steam; several of my friends are also into cinematography and production, and we all kind of enable one another in pursuit of our collective hobby. (Except the one of us who is a producer for a tv station in Green Bay, WI, we're all just hobby junkies.) The concept that movies could sponge that many figures for a budget just blows my mind. Then to see the actual breakdown of where the money was spent.. gah.
I'm biased - I'm one of the very few people who didn't like any of Shyamalan's movies. I found them two dimensional, predictable, and boring. I walked into the parking lot after 'Signs' and had an incoherent hissyfit complete with jumping up and down and radical gesticulations because I couldn't articulate how much I disliked that movie. (Earth.. mostly water. Aliens whose weakness is.. uh.. water. WTF?)
It seems like movies are going with bigger and bigger budgets to throw in Big Shiny Distractions and I can't decide whether this is because the status quo for viewers with attention spans has gone so completely down the toilet that such measures are necessary, or because the movies couldn't hold their own without said big shiny distractions. Sometimes the big shiny distraction is the names on the marquee, sometimes it's the overuse of CGI or SFX.
It makes me wonder what the ratio of actors with ulcers today as compared with actors with ulcers 20 years ago would be. I can't even imagine the pressure to walk into something where it's "Hi, we just got a budget of 70m, and we'd better have the box office bank and several gold statues of little naked men to justify it later." Because if a movie doesn't bank past the budget, it gets totally panned by everyone whether or not it was a decent movie. Contrariwise, if a movie doesn't start with a ridiculously large budget.. it doesn't make the news, doesn't stir that hype of 'zomg it's gotta be /awesome/!', doesn't engage people's curiousity.
.. train of thought derailing. To Be Con't.
I went through them all and zoned out at the numbers. More than three 0's and my brain shuts down and refuses to comprehend it as anything other than 'a lot'. What was interesting about the docs was that they're the budget, not the actual expenditures. This is just the list of numbers the movie was approved to spend, not what it actually did spend. They very well might be one and the same, but they could be radically different.
A group of friends and I write really bad movies to blow off steam; several of my friends are also into cinematography and production, and we all kind of enable one another in pursuit of our collective hobby. (Except the one of us who is a producer for a tv station in Green Bay, WI, we're all just hobby junkies.) The concept that movies could sponge that many figures for a budget just blows my mind. Then to see the actual breakdown of where the money was spent.. gah.
I'm biased - I'm one of the very few people who didn't like any of Shyamalan's movies. I found them two dimensional, predictable, and boring. I walked into the parking lot after 'Signs' and had an incoherent hissyfit complete with jumping up and down and radical gesticulations because I couldn't articulate how much I disliked that movie. (Earth.. mostly water. Aliens whose weakness is.. uh.. water. WTF?)
It seems like movies are going with bigger and bigger budgets to throw in Big Shiny Distractions and I can't decide whether this is because the status quo for viewers with attention spans has gone so completely down the toilet that such measures are necessary, or because the movies couldn't hold their own without said big shiny distractions. Sometimes the big shiny distraction is the names on the marquee, sometimes it's the overuse of CGI or SFX.
It makes me wonder what the ratio of actors with ulcers today as compared with actors with ulcers 20 years ago would be. I can't even imagine the pressure to walk into something where it's "Hi, we just got a budget of 70m, and we'd better have the box office bank and several gold statues of little naked men to justify it later." Because if a movie doesn't bank past the budget, it gets totally panned by everyone whether or not it was a decent movie. Contrariwise, if a movie doesn't start with a ridiculously large budget.. it doesn't make the news, doesn't stir that hype of 'zomg it's gotta be /awesome/!', doesn't engage people's curiousity.
.. train of thought derailing. To Be Con't.
posted by Peregrine at 10:04 AM
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