Hollywood Babble On & On #1181: Dreamworks Animation For Sale

Back when Dreamworks SKG was struggling to stay in the black they did have one ray of sunshine. Their animation division, run by Disney veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg had enjoyed some success with the computer animated blockbuster Shrek, which turned the company's fortunes around after some major flops in traditional animation.

In 2004 Dreamworks Animation was spun off as its own publicly traded company with Katzenberg at the head, and the other DW partners Stephen Spielberg and David Geffen as investors and board members. Now there's a report that Japanese investment fund Softbank is interested in buying Dreamworks Animation for about $3.4 billion, and it's making Dreamworks Animation stock do a happy dance.

Is Dreamworks Animation a good buy?

Well, let's think about it.

DWA has had its share of successes and failures, but even their successes come with a certain set of caveats.

One of the things that separated DWA from its biggest rival Pixar/Disney was that DWA was the "hip" one larding its films with timely pop culture references and catchphrases to make them look much more "with it."

The problem with being "with it" is that hipness has a best-before date. Try looking at the first Shrek movie and it looks incredibly dated. That's going to affect its viewership with future generations on television and home video.

Also, they flogged Shrek to death, putting out sequels long after the franchise ran out of steam.

Pixar, their arch-rival, aims for a certain amount of timelessness in their stories. Watch a Pixar classic like the Toy Story movies, or Up, and for the most part you really can't place them in any particular time period, and on a narrative level can be enjoyed well into the future without looking like the animated equivalent of a cameo by Sonny and Cher.

However, that franchise management philosophy is not written in stone and can be changed.

Another thing that has to change is the simple fact that the computer animated features that are their bread and butter cost so damn much. They've had films making $200-$300+ million at the box office that still write-offs after production, prints, and marketing were calculated in.

That ain't healthy.

For an animation studio to survive they need television, and lots of it. DWA has some TV productions, but they're much thinner on the ground than their rivals, Disney-Pixar-Marvel, Paramount-Nickelodeon, and Warner Bros-Cartoon Network-DC. 

That's because unlike their rivals, they don't have much depth in their line up. They have TV versions of their feature film characters, and not much else. Disney has their own roster of characters as well as Pixar's and Marvel's rosters, WB-Cartoon Network-DC has characters from the golden age like Bugs Bunny, to DC superheroes, Hannah Barbara, and the franchises they built from scratch. The closest comparison is Paramount-Nickelodeon, who built a large roster of characters and franchises from scratch, but who had an advantage that DWA lacks, which is their own TV channel that's directly invested in the success of those new franchises.

Which still makes me wonder if DWA is a good buy, and I'm no closer to an answer.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1172: A Minority Report of One

Amblin TV,  the TV production arm of mega mogul Stephen Spielberg, is developing a TV series version of Spielberg's 2002 hit Minority Report.

In case you don't remember the movie, it was an adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick story about an elite police unit that handles "pre-crimes." Basically three "pre-cogs" with the ability to see the future spot crimes before they happen have their visions analyzed by police, and then the suspect is then grabbed and imprisoned without trial.

Now the unit isn't shut down by the Supreme Court for its total destruction of the legal system on the word of three chemically mutated people who live int a kiddie pool, instead, it's brought down by Tom Cruise, the unit's commander, when it predicts that he'll kill someone after a lot of chases, fights, and other big action set-pieces.

Now unlike other movie-to-series ideas I'm not going to judge if the premise has enough meat to become a decent TV series. (Since the premise of "pre-crime" fighting does lie at the heart of the successful series Person of Interest.)

This time around I'm going offer some advice to the lovely folks at Amblin TV.

If they want Minority Report to succeed as a TV series then there is one person they must keep as far away from it as possible, and that person's name is…

STEPHEN SPIELBERG

Now you're probably wonder "But he's behind some of the biggest movies in Hollywood history, his touch should be golden when it comes to TV!"

You'd think that, but then you'd be wronger than a wrong person who just climbed up the wrong tree on the corner of Wrong & Really Wrong in the heart of the town of Wrongsville, Population: You.

When it comes to developing TV series Spielberg and Amblin's record is decidedly checkered. If you do some deep digging you quickly realize that Amblin/Dreamworks' most successful TV projects tend to be the ones that have an arms length relationship with the great man himself.

However, if it's one of Spielberg's "passion projects" the odds say it's doomed to be an expensive flop.

Examples:

Amazing Stories, a wildly uneven sci-fi/fantasy anthology series that tried to revive the wonder found in old pulp-magazines like the show's namesake and early sci-fi shows like The Twilight Zone, but was too often mired in sentimentality and cliche.

Seaquest DSV, a show set on a submarine where the smartest character was the dolphin, who wasn't smart enough to swim to a better show.

Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, got pretty good reviews and ratings, but was so damned expensive, the network couldn't afford to keep it, though they did try to keep it alive via TV movies, but it was doomed almost from the beginning.

Terra Nova at first it sounded like it was guaranteed to be the biggest thing on TV. You had a show with time-travel, dinosaurs, and Spielberg was personally invested in its success. What could go wrong? Apparently everything.

So why does Spielberg have a reverse Midas touch when it comes to television?

It's born in how Spielberg operates. His organization is very much a family affair, built around a small, tightly knit clique of trusted insiders. Spielberg has a horrible aversion to conflict and confrontation, and this tightly knit clique works very hard making sure he doesn't hear any bad news.

Now within this clique there is, no doubt, some facility to debate and discuss ideas, however if you're outside this clique, forget about it.

So let's look at how shows are made. Basically a network commissions a pilot based on a pitch, and if the pilot gets a green light to become a series, those involved in the show, then have all sorts of conflicts and confrontations that hash out the idea into a television series for better or for worse. It works best when there's a strong creative team behind the show that have a solid vision behind it.

You can't do that if Spielberg is "intimately involved" in the show.

That's the main problem of Spielberg being a key player in a TV show's development. While his presence may get a pilot commissioned, he usually fades away during the important creative process that lies between the pilot script and the green-lit series, because he's got better things to do called "movies."

So you get a dangerous combination, where the projects are often passed off to people who often aren't as emotionally invested in the project as Spielberg. Even if they were, and wanted to fight passionately for the project, the network will insist they defer to Spielberg, and since Spielberg lives in horror of conflict, and is distracted by his movie projects, will go along with the network just to get along, as long as the network pledges to spending truckloads of cash making and promoting the show. Since he's promoted himself as being "intimately involved" he feels compelled to make those sorts of decisions, whether he's giving it 100% of his mental energies or not.

This leads to some pretty weak tea, lacking coherent leadership and world building, and a network shovelling buckets of money into it.

My advice is for Spielberg to publicly recuse himself from nominal leadership of this show as soon as he finds someone with the passion and the will to handle the conflict and confrontations that he isn't willing to.

Then they might have a success.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1143: Growth, Death, Or Farce?

Jeffrey Katzenberg raised some hackles when he declared during a speech that the movie industry is not a "growth industry" and that television is.

Well, he's wrong and he's right.

He's right in that at the moment the Hollywood movie industry is not a growth industry because it's management is sluggish, top-heavy, narrow minded, with business practices that range from silly to downright shady, and the studios are too busy making overpriced movies that need to break records just to break even while wilfully ignoring opportunities right in front of them.

Television is growing right now, but the traditional model will be hitting a wall and soon. There are so many outlets, almost all of them producing original content, and only so many people on the planet with only so much time on their hands for casual viewing. Then there's the cable-cutting, and a generation coming up who are used to watching things on computer screens and very unwilling to pay for what they're watching. Katzenberg suggests charging people "by the inch" or by the size of the device they're watching the movie on, and changing the "windows" that dictate when a film is released in theatres, and the many kinds of home video.

The funny thing is, THIS HAS ALL HAPPENED BEFORE!

Pop your head into the way-back machine and travel back to the 1950s and 1960s. The studios were in rough shape. The government had forced them out of the theatre business, they had become incredibly top heavy, management wise, and one by one the the original founding moguls fell and were replaced by people who were more middle-level number crunching managerial than the sort of big picture entrepreneurial types who started the whole thing.

To top it all off television had reared it's flickering head as the first serious competition the movies had faced since vaudeville. The studios responded by making bigger, louder, and more colourful movies in the hope that they would win audiences back. 

While some broke records, and became classics, far too many cost too much to make a profit, and some of them bombed so badly they endangered the future of the studios that made them.

Sound familiar.

Karl Marx once said that history does repeat itself, the first time as a tragedy, and the next time as  farce.

Feature films were saved by the so-called "Movie Brat" generation. They were upstart baby-boomers raised on classic movies and early television who all wanted to make feature films because they wanted to do things they couldn't do on television.

The problem with feature films now is that there isn't anything you can do on a big screen that you can't do on television. 

In fact, there's one thing you can't do in most big budget feature films that is being done all the time on television, and that's tell a richly complex story.

What's the point of this rant?

Not really sure anymore.

All I do know is that we can't really put much credence in anyone's predictions of the future, even an expert who green-lit Peabody & Sherman, because the future hasn't happened yet. That means any attempt at a prediction is nothing more than guess work.

What do you think?

Hollywood Babble On & On #1082: Flop Autopsy

Today, I'm slipping on the long rubber gloves and breaking my scalpels of analysis and sarcasm to perform autopsies on two currently famous flops.

Wheel in the first patient....

CASE #1: THE FIFTH ESTATE: This film is about Julian Assange and the rise of Wikileaks from Dreamworks and Disney with British rising star Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role of Assange. The film died a horrible death at the box office, pulling in one of the worst per-screen averages for a wide release seen in a long time. 

This is despite a big money ad campaign, and reams of publicity, hoping to make the film not only a hit, but an Oscar contender.

WHY WAS IT A BAD IDEA?:  There are those who dislike Assange, true, but there are also those who support Assange. So why didn't they go to see the movie? Because nobody seems to actually like Assange as a person, even if they support his goals of publishing the secrets of countries that won't assassinate him. 

If people already think they know about as much of his story as they think they can stand then they need to have some one of two things to make them want to see the movie. An emotional connection, or a deep interest in the main character. 

Take the movie Gandhi for example. Ask the average early 80s movie-goer about Mahatma Gandhi and while they may not know much about his life, they associate positive notions to him. The studio then marketed the film as an uplifting emotional experience, and it paid off big time.

Now I'm not saying you can't make a movie about a "bad boy" or "antihero" but if you do that person must be INTERESTING.

Assange just strikes most people as a creepy, often hypocritical, opportunist and possible sex-offender. He's not really interesting enough to carry a big screen bio-pic. Those who oppose his work, find him and a film about him too repulsive to pay money to see, and those who support his goals find him and his story too boring. Especially when the commercials portray the film about him as a sort of  action thriller-meets-hagiography, whether the actual film really was or not. 

WHY DID SOMEONE THINK IT WAS A GOOD IDEA?: This is where Hollywood's tendencies for isolation and group-think affect decisions.

Do a survey of the residents of the Axis of Ego and you will discover that the overwhelming majority vote the same way, support the same causes, and rarely encounter anyone that thinks differently from them. On the rare occasions they do, they just assume that the outsider has something wrong with them.

They think Assange must be interesting to everyone because he doesn't like the same things they don't like, they also believe their own way-unrealistic portrayals of the CIA, and they honestly believe the mainstream audience agrees with them about everything.

HOW CAN SUCH THINGS BE PREVENTED?: A little common sense. Which means that such things will never be prevented.

____________

CASE 2: IRONSIDE: NBC revived the 1960-1970s series about a wheelchair bound detective, only to see it crash and burn horribly being cancelled after only a few episodes.

WHY WAS IT A BAD IDEA?: Here's what I think is what happened at NBC the day they decided to green-light Ironside.

PRES: We need show ideas! But nothing too original! Original is wrong!

VICE-PRES: How about Ironside, except this time around, we make him young, sexy, and black. It's guaranteed to be a hit!

PRES: Brilliant! You're fired so I can claim the idea as my own!

Now let's look at the facts of the original show.

The original Ironside starred  Canadian legend Raymond Burr as a Chief of Detectives for the San Francisco PD crippled by a sniper's bullet. The premise was that he was an old-school authority figure who now depended on a team of modern young people to help him fight crime and prove that he was worth just as much as an able-bodied detective. It was as much as the differences of generations as it was about the case of the week.

Ironside was about the wisdom of age and experience being partnered with the energy of youth and how working together made both better.

Now making the Ironside character young and sexy kind of tosses the premise out of the window. It's like doing a remake of Fawlty Towers, without Basil Fawlty (which actually happened).

But even the original premise probably wouldn't fly today since the war over the generation gap ended with the complete surrender of the baby-boom generation.

WHY DID SOMEONE THINK IT WAS A GOOD IDEA?: Because the people running big 4 TV networks are all scared of being fired.

This fear says that they should avoid originality, because originality is dangerous. The only safe thing it to get something vaguely familiar and hope that the familiarity will sell it. Even when it tanks, which happens pretty regularly, they can always say: "Don't blame me, we did all we could."

HOW CAN SUCH THINGS BE PREVENTED?: Only if the mainstream networks decide to fully follow their cable brethren and go whole hog for creativity over fear.

That's not to say that a remake or a revival can't work. It is possible. However, the people doing the remake/revival must have something more behind the premise than just making the lead younger and sexier.

Hollywood Babble On & On #994: 2 Things That Sound Good, But Probably Aren't That Great...

THE RETURN OF PRINCESS LEIA?

Word is bopping around that Carrie Fisher is set to head again for a certain galaxy far far away and rejoin Harrison Ford for the upcoming Disney/J.J. Abrams Star Wars sequel.

Here's the working title: Star Wars Episode 7: A New Hip.

Personally, I feel that bringing back the stars of the original trilogy is something that sounds great to someone inside Hollywood, but probably doesn't ring all that true to those living in the real world.

When the original trilogy ended with Return of the Jedi we had the space opera equivalent of the happy ending. Bringing them back, 30+ years older, is a bit of a downer. The fans want to remember them as they were in the last movie, still young and heroic. Not old and yelling out the window of the Millennium Falcon for the kids to get off their lawn.

I think they would have been better off starting a new franchise with new characters that can explore different parts of the "expanded universe."

But that would be original, and Disney, being a Hollywood studio fears originality, even though it was the originality of the first trilogy that made it a cultural touchstone. So they try to copy as much of the original as they think they can get away with, except its originality.

Does that make any sense?

CORRECTION: Now the word is that she was just jerking our chain.

SPIELBERG MIGHT DO KUBRICK... AGAIN...

Stephen Spielberg has announced that he's developing Stanley Kubrick's massive script for his unrealized epic Napoleon as a television miniseries.

On the surface it sounds like a great idea. Miniseries, especially historical costume dramas, seem to do great business these days. Also it's probably the best way to do Kubrick's highly detailed and meticulously researched vision for the project, which he and his writing partners could never condense into a feature film length.

However...

Maybe it's me, but while Kubrick greatly respected Spielberg's talent, their styles, at least in my eyes, don't mesh. Kubrick was cynical in tone and clinical in style, Spielberg is an emotional romanticist, which made their post-mortem collaboration A.I. kind of a disappointment, at least to me.

Then again, maybe I'm just a worrier.

Hollywood Babble On & On #882: Is The Dream Of Dreamworks Over?

All is not well in the magical land of Dreamworks.

The upstart mini-major is suffering from lackluster box office, a tightening of the purse strings by major investor Reliance, and other money woes that have led to the resignation of one senior executive, and reports of a further 10% reduction in the company's overall staff on the horizon.

When the company first started it seemed like a perfect deal.  The three founding partners were considered the gold seal of guaranteed success in Hollywood.  

Stephen Spielberg pretty much defined the modern blockbuster, Jeffrey Katzenberg was one of the key players in the rebirth of Disney from struggling cartoon company to media juggernaut, and David Geffen who went from the mail-room at the William Morris Agency to becoming a music mogul, film producer, and billionaire investor.

These are very smart customers who know what they're doing.

So what went wrong?

Well, I suspect that some fundamental mistakes were made that have come back to haunt them.

1. DISTRIBUTION: When Dreamworks was founded it was set up with the ability to distribute its own productions.  It gave up that ability when it was sold to Paramount, and when the company, in partnership with Indian financial player Reliance ADA, bought its freedom a little more than two years later, it failed to restore a truly independent distribution capability.

Instead, they handed over distribution of their movies to Disney's Touchstone Pictures in a 30 picture deal.  

A big problem with that deal is that Disney doesn't really give a crap about Touchstone anymore.  They're not going to burn the same amount of calories that a distributor that belongs wholly to Dreamworks would.

Also, when you're a distributor you can make distribution deals with other production companies to fill the gaps in your own release schedule.  That gives you the income of distribution fees and/or box office share without the risk of being the guy who paid to make the movie.

2. UNDER EXPLOITATION:  Dreamworks has only been able to scratch the surface of the television market, producing only a handful of shows, and too many of them short lived.  

One of the reasons for this is the simple fact that unlike Paramount, Universal, Disney, Fox, or Warner Bros. they don't belong to a conglomerate that owns or co-owns a broadcast network like CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and the CW. 

That means that they already have a strike against them. The networks will always give preferences to shows that they, or one of their sister companies, own, all others have to hit a homer at every swing, or go out the door as soon as the opportunity arises.

The cable market is a much wider field, with more independent players that they could do business with, but here again they failed to exploit a potential market to its fullest.  Most of their cable TV ventures have been in partnership with HBO and TNT, both of which are owned by Time Warner.  That means that they will always be the junior partner in any deal.

3. PLAYING THE MAJOR'S GAME: Dreamworks has always been ambitious, declaring their intention to make major Hollywood movies. Many times they succeeded, but unlike the real majors, they didn't have the cushion of distribution, and television to soften the blow when one or more of their big productions failed to turn a profit.

Dreamworks needed to create a more solid foundation for the company in television, in distribution, and in smaller budget "exploitation" genre films that don't get awards, but have a better risk/reward ratio than the usual big budget epic.

Then they might have avoided the problems that are plaguing them now.

Hollywood Babble On & On #878: James Frey Is Like A Tainted Burrito

There's nothing I hate more than things I don't like, and things that I don't like just keeps popping up like  tainted burritos...

My biggest tainted burrito is James Frey.

I admit it, I don't like the guy.  

He's an admitted liar with his whole A Million Little Pieces faux autobiography scam, and his Full Fathom Five "packaging" business is one big bend -the -writer- over -&- ream- them- with- a- stiff-wire- brush operation where authors are paid the steam off James Frey's pee to do all the work for him with no rights, and all the liabilities.  Even at their most controlling and penny pinching worst the major studios at least made sure the writers were at least well paid.

So far the company has plopped a bunch of mostly forgotten YA books onto the market, one movie, I Am Number Four, which didn't even break even at the domestic box office and got a "rotten" rating from critics, and one TV pilot they sold to CBS about a former President who becomes a street level lawyer called Legacy, which in itself was a pretty blatant rip-off of the failed NBC former Supreme Court Justice becomes a lawyer drama Outlaw.  On his own, Frey was only able to plop out something that wasn't so much a novel, but a cry for attention & the sympathy of the literary elite by penning a deliberately offensive and ultimately pointless modern dress retelling of the New Testament.

Now he's expanding his reach into film and television with the hiring of former Reveille executive Todd Cohen to run things for him.  Knowing Frey's style of contracts any idea he comes up with becomes Frey's property, but if they lead to a lawsuit Cohen will be on his own.

Which leads me to a mystery that I may never solve.

Why on Earth would anyone do business with this guy?

Seriously.

You can't even say that it's the money. So far he's got a movie that came and went like a popcorn fart, some YA books that have been overshadowed by the mega-phenomenons of Twilight and the Hunger Games, and a TV pilot that eerily resembles the premise of a failed series for another network that I don't think has even become a series yet, because like its predecessor is doomed to crash and burn.

I can't even find anyone who has anything nice to say about him.

He must be one hell of a salesman.

Hollywood Babble On & On #861: If At First You Don't Succeed.... Flog A Dead Horse.

TERRA NOVA GOES EXTINCT

The Fox Network has axed the science fiction dino-drama Terra Nova, refusing to renew it for a second season.  The reasons the network dropped the other shoe is that the show cost too much, and delivered too little in the form of ratings.  Now I've always been cynical of the show, feelings it's premise was too limited, the characters too cliche, and there were huge logic holes like humanity inventing time travel, but forgetting everything learned about pollution control learned since the industrial revolution, and the stupidity of settling people in a time where they know that a big comet will eventually and inevitably come down and wipe them all out.

The whole show reeked of something formed by committee, as seen by its revolving door of people involved in developing the show, the multiple show-runners it went through during its run, and it's see-sawing quality.  I was expecting that they would have given it a second season in the vain hope of recouping their investment before finally giving up.

And speaking of giving up, the producers of the show have declared that they will not give up and are going to shop the show to other networks.

My advice: Let it die.

That sort of big scale science fiction adventure series needs a singular and equally big vision behind it, not just a big budget, and a big ad campaign.

So let Terra Nova go extinct, and find someone with an idea with legs, and run with that.

HEFNER MOVIE FINDS NEW HOME

The long gestating and often passed around bio-pic of Hugh Hefner has found a new home at Warner Bros with producer Jerry Weintraub.

The question on everyone's lips is "Why?"

A good biopic needs a good ending. It needs a brilliant triumph, or a terrible tragedy. Not the sad pathetic fizzling of a man from sexual iconoclast to irrelevant punchline.

Now I suspect that this round of development is going to end like all the other attempts, and the movie won't get made.

However, I also suspect that Hollywood will still keep trying to get it made.

Why?

Because Hollywood is the last place on Earth that still thinks Hefner's still relevant.  They don't realize that where they see a symbol of the sexual freedom of the 1960 and 1970s, the rest of the world sees a lecherous old coot chasing women so similar and plasticized in appearance that it shows a very obvious failure of the imagination.

That image of lechery, senility, and banality will attach itself to any movie made about the man, but Hollywood can't see it, because it's also on them.

Hollywood Babble On & On #812: History Repeats Itself...

CBS has made a deal for a new legal drama called Legacy, and will be co-produced by Dreamworks TV.

But that's not the greasy bit about this story.  Not by a long shot.

The premise has been created by James Frey's Full Fathom Five ripoff idea factory.  So you know that it's going to be chock full of originality and creative integrity.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

The premise is about a former US President who becomes a street level lawyer after leaving office.

If that doesn't sound familiar, then maybe this will jog your memory...

Still doesn't?

Well, that's not much of a surprise, since about three people actually saw the show during its truncated run on NBC in 2010.  But the show was about a conservative Supreme Court Justice quitting the highest court in the land to become a liberal street level lawyer.  Each week he'd tackle some issue that teaches him and the audience just how wrong he was to be a strict constructionist.

The problem with the show was that it was basically one big lecture about how evil you are for disagreeing with him.  The people on the right were insulted, and the people on the left were bored, and hence no one watched the show.

Those behind the show will most likely declare: "This time is different, this isn't a Supreme Court Justice, this is a President we're talking about."

And they will be full of bullshit.

It will not only be so much like its predecessor in the dustbin of TV history, it will join it there very quickly.

Here's why.

Hollywood is not known for its imagination or open mindedness, especially when it comes to "topical" or "political" subject matter.  So there are precisely two ways they'll handle this show:

1.  The ex-President will be a conservative Republican who has a "Road To Beverly Hills Damascus" moment and like Outlaw, become a liberal lawyer out to undo all the evil things he did while in office.

or

2.  The ex-President will be a liberal Democrat who goes around lecturing people about how evil and stupid they are for disagreeing with him about the issues tackled on his show every week.

Now how will this end up?

Conservatives will be insulted.

Liberals will be bored.


Neither will watch the show.

But that's not all that I think will doom this project to failure.  There's also the way it's been created...

Now if you've read my past writings on Frey and his so-called Full Fathom Five scheme, I made a fairly obvious prediction. 

The FF5 contract is designed to keep those who actually burn the calories creating the material in a state of relative anonymity in comparison with their padrone, with no rights or control over their creations, and a profit share plan that consists of the steam off James Frey's pee.  I predicted that such a contract will keep Frey's scribbling serfs from bringing their "A Game."

Turns out, I was half right.  They're not even bringing their "B," "C," or "D," game.  We are in strictly "Z Game" territory.

Sticking to the upper echelons of the alphabet means that the peons will at least be ripping off and mashing up previously successful franchises.  His I Am Number Four was a mash up of Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Twilight, so you could understand it having a chance to succeed.  However this project is a pretty blatant rip-off of what was an obviously bad idea that only someone living in the rarefied air of Hollywood could think would sell. 

But Frey will be getting paid, which means even more of his sleazy Full Fathom Five nonsense in the future.  Which makes an already bad idea even worse.

There must be something in the water over at CBS these days.

Hollywood Babble On & On #788: Fright Night Got Fried Friday Night

It's official.

Fright Night, the remake of the 1985 horror comedy, crashed and burned at the box office this past weekend, beaten by The Help and Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. This despite a 74% "Fresh" rating with critics, and a 75% positive response from people who have actually seen the movie.

So how could a film with so much good buzz do so badly?

I think it was done in by two things: 3D, and the ad campaign.

3D went from being the mind-blowing wave of the future to become Hollywood code for "We don't think this film is very good, so here's a cheap stunt, and an excuse to jack up the ticket price," faster than the Flash on his way to a booty call.

People who were iffy on seeing the film would look at the 3D tag, and think: "Feh, it's not worth the extra cost or the headache from the 3D glasses. If I hear it's any good I'll just rent it on Netflix."

That's not good.

Then there's the ad campaign. The TV commercials were especially unhelpful being essentially montages of co-star Colin Farrell swaggering around threatening people, with inserts of commentary from other co-star Anton Yelchin, but mostly from Christopher Mintz-Plasse who is most famous for playing "McLovin" in the movie Superbad.

You don't really get any sense of the story's "nobody believes me" storyline, anything concrete about the lead's relationship with his girlfriend, other than that she's hotter than his social standing deserves. And there's a big fat gap.

That gap is Peter Vincent.

Peter Vincent, played by former Doctor Who actor David Tennant, is the showman turned amateur vampire hunter played by Roddy McDowall in the original film. He's the only person to believe the teenager's story about living next door to a vampire, and plays a pretty major part in the story.

If all you know about the film comes from the TV ads you're lucky to get a glimpse of Tennant, who literally has millions of fans worldwide, who are full of goodwill towards him because of his great turn as the Doctor. But the ads make what was hyped as a major role in all the pre-release buzz look like nothing more than a "blink and you'll miss it" cameo. Basically, it's all Farrell, all swagger, all the time, and despite what Hollywood wants to believe, Farrell is not a serious draw at the box office.

So why did the studio base the ads almost entirely on an actor of questionable ticket selling ability instead of using the film's positives, like dark humor, popular ex-Dr. Who, and good old fashioned scares.

Probably because of the curse of familiarity.

Farrell is the most well known name in the film, especially inside Hollywood. Tennant's fan-base is mostly outside Hollywood among the "geeks" who, in the collective hive-mind of Hollywood, are only supposed to go to superhero and sci-fi movies. When in doubt Hollywood will always stick with what Hollywood knows. Then there's the familiarity of the Twilight movies and their sexy, swaggering vampires with fashionably mussed hair, and someone at the studio said: "Hey, let's make it sexy like Twilight, that'll sell."

Kinda forgetting that Fright Night is supposed to be a horror movie with elements of dark humor, while Twilight is supposed to be a rather soppy romantic fairy tale written by someone who basically drew the name of a mythical creature out of a hat, and ran with it.

There's a lesson in all this, but I doubt Hollywood is going to learn it anytime soon.

Hollywood Babble On & On #735: Kung Fu Panda 2 Kicks 3D In The Nads

Kung Fu Panda 2 had a $60+ domestic opening, and made about $57 million internationally.

Not a bad opening in my opinion.

But then again, I don't work in Hollywood or Wall Street. Both are having a little conniption fit about its "under-performance" in the face of the Hangover 2 juggernaut, and the stock prices of Dreamworks Animation, the company that made it, and RealD, the people behind the 3D process both took a bit of a shit-kicking in the stock market.

Well, it's not all the pudgy panda's fault.

3D movies have been heading for a crash pretty much from the moment they started. The problem is that the only people who don't see the brick wall heading their way are the people driving the damn industry.

Think about it for a second.

1. As if getting to a theater isn't a costly hassle already, you are expected to pay more to wear special glasses that could have been last worn by a hobo with scabies, rabies, and the clap, to watch a movie that more than likely retroactively "processed" into 3D, leaving you with a muddy, dark picture, that might have some 3D bits to it in the big special effects scenes. Then there are the odds of headaches and nausea from the 3D images themselves.

It's just not worth it.

It's especially not worth it when the bulk of movies offered in 3D have stories that are forgotten before you even find your car in the theater parking lot.

2. Let's not forget that this has happened before. The 1950s saw the movie business hit a slump that affected it, more or less, until the 1970s. During this time they tried all sorts of "revolutionary" ideas to win back audiences from the rival television. Some, like widescreen and color stuck, but most, like 3D, became mere novelty acts in the great movie biz vaudeville show, short lived and usually just playing to the haircuts.

Of course modern 3D's biggest advocates are screaming "this time it's different!" with all the vehemence of the born again evangelist, or the addict to his parole officer after his 12th stretch in court-ordered rehab. They say that we now, or will soon, have the technology to do it right, and are spending tens of millions of dollars of investors money to prove it.

Well, it looks like the investors have seen the brick wall, and are looking to ditch before impact.

I can't blame them, because history is on their side.

If you don't know your history, and many in Hollywood don't, the only thing that stopped Hollywood's 1950s-1960s death spiral was the burst of then young Baby Boomer filmmakers who revolutionized the business by revolutionizing movie storytelling.

Do you see what I'm getting at?

The revolution that saved Hollywood was all about not telling people what they should want to see, like gimmicky, overpriced spectacles, to giving them what they really wanted to see, which was interesting stories they considered worth their time and money.

But sadly, the Baby Boomer generation of filmmakers are either washed up, self-destructed, or transformed into the fat cats they once rebelled against. In their wake is an industry that believes that all they have to do is throw enough money at a problem to solve it, when the imagination is the key.

Don't believe me about that? Think about the simple fact that Hollywood and Wall Street are seeing a $60 million opening weekend as a "disappointment" and then think about what that is telling you.

3D history will repeat itself, and Hollywood is damned determined to make it even more expensive than it was before. The question is, will the revolution that resurrected the industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s repeat itself?