Entertainment Weekly held a Visionaries panel over the weekend that included directors Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, The World's End), Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Gravity) and Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man, (500) Days of Summer). During the Q&A session, an attendee asked the group about the comments made by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas about the impending "implosion" of the film industry. If you missed that story, here's the big quote from Spielberg, via The Hollywood Reporter:
There's eventually going to be an implosion - or a big meltdown. There's going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen megabudget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that's going to change the paradigm.The basic gist of what Spielberg and Lucas said in the above article is that Hollywood may move to a Broadway type model, where fewer movies stay in theaters longer and tickets cost more. The rest would migrate to TV.
Well Wright, Cuaron and Webb all weighed in on that during the panel and I think that they offered some pretty good insight. I've selected a few of their statements to post here, but you can read the full response in the top link.
Alfonso Cuaron: What is definitely changing is the way in which films are released and distributed. I think we are about to have a moment in which there’s going to be a big change, well it’s affecting the industry already. The big multiplex cinemas are now almost exclusive for big movies whereas a few years ago you could find small movies there. It’s probably the last generation where those kind of films will be shown in multiplexes.
Marc Webb: I think also that something’s happening with TV too and Comic Con is a perfect example of it, like the shows that are here. I think a lot of the wonderful writers have migrated to TV because they get more control with their domain and it’s a longer form… They are novelistic with the serialized form. It’s incredible and the kinds of storytelling you can give there is pretty awesome.
Edgar Wright: I think it’s just going to be a choice. There’s a place for every thing and I think there is an appetite for original films as well as the franchises and series and it sometimes just comes down to the season. It’s like in the summer season the big effects movies come out, but last year four of the Best Picture nominees all grossed over a hundred million, so it’s not like there isn’t a market for that. It’s definitely true that the multiplex has to get more diverse or there has to be a chance for indie films to break out and that’s why I’m excited to see GRAVITY, it’s an original film this year and you do have to think it’s got to be about… If we don’t start doing more original films, there will be nothing to remake in thirty years time.Those are the three major points that I want to hit on; changes in distribution, TV and original films.
First, let's look at distribution. The one thing that I feel lucky about living in Ashland, Ore. is that we have a theater, The Varsity, that will play the smaller, independent films. This summer, I was able to see Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing and Noel Baumbach's Frances Ha there. It's great to see these small films on the big screen, but that's not how most are coming out. More often, film festivals are how you see the small features on the big screen, with most viewers seeing them through VOD, iTunes, Netflix or eventual DVD/Blu Ray releases. The great thing about all of these alternate avenues, as Cuaron says later, is that there's no excuse to not make a movie anymore. Webb points out that we all have access to equipment that filmmakers once dreamed of using. You can shoot a film with your friends on your DSLR and then sell it on iTunes. It's an exciting prospect, but it can overload you with crap. But it can also make that amazing indie that you stumbled across on Netflix that much more special. The idea that these smaller features may move to TV is a little unlikely. While the bigger indies might show up on HBO or perhaps even AMC or FX, the average indie will probably see more internet distribution.
With TV being where it is, they don't need original movies because of the strength of their series'. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, Modern Family, Girls, Game of Thrones, and that's just a small sampling of some of the amazing shows that are gracing the small screen right now. These shows are not the Father Knows Best feel good series' of yesteryear. The characters are so highly flawed. You have characters you love and characters that you love to hate. While we've had these shows in the past, we haven't had so many at one time before. Television is where people are going for their original content these days rather than movie theaters.
It's tough to find an original idea in the multiplex's now. I can't even guess what percentage of movies are based off of a comic book, or are sequels or remakes or book adaptations or tv series continuations. The amount of purely original ideas is tiny. Moviegoers lament and cry out for original films, but what happens when an original film does come? The movie goers go see the old standard. Let's look at a recent example with Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim. This is an original idea, not based on past properties and was absolutely fantastic. There were amazing characters within spectacular action. And what happened it's opening weekend? Pacific Rim came in third to Despicable Me 2 and Grown Ups 2. GROWN UPS 2 BEAT PACIFIC RIM! Moviegoers need to make some changes if this isn't what they want. If the original ideas are what people want, then we need to actually go see them. Hollywood won't take those risks if the history shows that the risks rarely pay off.
At this point, all we have is speculation. We may hit a fantastic renaissance of film where the greatest films of our generation are released weekly. But for now, we just have to search for the spectacular ones among the crap. But this is just me, let me know what you think down in the comments.
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