THE DECLINE OF ORIGINAL MOVIES

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THE DECLINE OF ORIGINAL MOVIES
2009-10-08 4:18PM / 標準BLOG / 會員可以看
3個評論
By now, everyone in Hollywood knows that Disney is significantly downsizing Miramax films, it's arthouse film division. The press releases say they're just cutting staff and reducing the number of films they'll distribute, but in reality, most folks in the biz believe that this is Disney's way of gradually dissolving the division altogether. In other words, in a year or two, Miramax may be gone for good. Which is sad because it was one of the few places left that tried to release original films like The Queen and No Country For Old Men. Given the current trend in Hollywood, this isn't surprising. Hollywood is more obsessed than ever with remaking movies that don't need to be remade, or turning toys and video games into films -- even though the majority of these films don't succeed [see below].
It makes me wonder, are there any studios left with the balls to make original movies? What happened to the great original screenplay? Have film execs forgotten that many of the biggest box office successes of all time were generated from original scripts? Whether you like these movies or not, be it Star Wars, Titanic, The Matrix or more recent releases like District 9, The Hangover or Avatar, they all started with an original idea for a film, and were all wildly successful. Yet more and more, film execs are turning their backs on original stories. For all those execs who are convinced that studios should focus on toys, video games, comic books and remakes, I'd like to remind them that for every Transformers, there are many more similar films that flop like Doom, Final Fantasy, Dragonball Z and Land of the Lost. I'm all for making big, commercial entertainment, but perhaps it's time to get back to what made Hollywood flourish in the first place: an original script.
Here's a link about the demise of Miramax, and here's an article about Hollywood's obsession with turning toys into movies.

BLOG評論 (3)

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Michael Chan
留言於2009-10-10 12:38AM [举报]

the studio movie model is dying (or getting reinvented i suppose) as we know it, and if i recall correctly miramax successfully buried a lot of their losing films so the figures looked a lot better than they actually were. i suspect money was less of an issue when firms were under less financial scrutiny (as they are now), and back then the profitable movies were profitable enough to cover the small risky ones. these days there's no margin for error. i have to say a lot of execs get a really bad rep, many of them love all sorts of art and cinema but at the end of the day employment is pretty important.

and definitely YES, the script. or even just the story, an interesting and non-cliche story. especially out here in Asia.
peachey
留言於2009-10-08 10:17PM [举报]

It is pretty depressing to see what's going on in the movies now. Constantly hear about the millions being spent on more and more remakes. How boring and uninspiring. It's too bad that when cash is tight and times are tough, the big studios feel they have to resort to rehashing old stories.
Marie Jost
留言於2009-10-08 6:56PM [举报]

I think the only way Hollywood is going to change is for people to stop going to see any toy-comic book-television show spinoffs, however good they might be. It seems that the only thing Hollywood listens to anymore is money. In the old days, Hollywood balanced a mission of making money (always predominant) with the idea that some films deserved to be made because they were above run of the mill entertainment, sort of like the record labels' commitment to classical music, which is always a money looser (except for a few star performers). Somewhere along the way, Hollywood has lost its commitment to cinema as an art form and focuses now on movies as strictly lowest common denominator popular entertainment. Give the 18-24 year old male what he whats (or what he wanted for 10 minutes last year) and the rest of us be damned. For the moviegoer, at least we have Netflix, the Internet and DVDs. For the American screenwriters and directors who aren't interested in the dominant genres on offer in Hollywood, I'm not sure what the answer is. Its not like you can immigrate to another country and make films there.