Dear Hollywood,
it has come to my attention that it is now the middle of 2014 and, regretfully, I can count on one hand the number of films you’ve produced which have actually been worth spending my time and money on. Actually, one hand is probably more than I need.
As a reviewer in the context of increasingly over-priced tickets, I feel a pretty keen responsibility over a single issue: is this movie worth the time and money a reader might spend on it? The answer so far this year – with a couple of exceptions – has been a resounding “No.”
Your obsession with sequels, reboots, superheroes and remakes is becoming depressing. You appear to be stuck in a cycle of bigger and bigger budget movies relying on massive special effects and a star system that requires insane amounts of money being spent on products that – by necessity – you are then forced to play safe on. Last year was bad, this year is worse and the next five to ten years at this rate are also – you guessed it – not looking good.
The same old tired, frankly juvenile, story of militarized good guys fighting against bad guys is being played out again and again and again. (With the good guys, naturally, almost all being men.) Or you throw a dumbed down science fiction movie to the masses for good measure.
Either way, you can hardly be accused ramping up the originality at the moment, can you? Come on, be honest now. You know its true, I know its true and the average audience member knows it is essentially true as well.
But here is the worst thing about this situation:
You are bottlenecking the industry and creating a situation where films with anything less than a budget that would feed a third world country for an entire year are forcing out more modestly budgeted films. Ones that actually have a decent story, relevant themes to today and clever scripts and characters, and don’t feel the necessity of telling the same tired story with the same tired clichés.
These films, unable to compete with your insanely high marketing budgets have no chance of getting into cinemas at all.
On the flip side – and this is where my extreme frustration with the current situation you are forcing on the rest of us really lies – films are actually getting cheaper and cheaper to make.
Hell, last year’s top independent film (by my own assessment) was shot for a mere £2,000. Two grand! Imagine that! And the thing is that isn’t an exception. Time and again high quality independent films are hitting my radar one way or another which have been shot on miniscule budget and yet which – although not flawless – have each individually inspired and enlightened me in their own unique ways far more than your entire collected output in 2014 so far.
It’s the dark little secret that you are, presumably, terrified of anyone finding out – that a good film can be made on a tiny fraction of the budgets you work with. And so you keep racking up the budgets and hiking up the ticket prices and hitting the superhero, sequel, reboot and remake buttons again and again – each time draining a little more life from the original, and making movies that are just a little bit dumber with each passing year.
Meanwhile, the good stuff is getting made but not hitting cinema screens for audiences to see. The irony is that independent films are getting better and better, whilst your huge budget movies are getting increasingly stale and tired.
It is, quite frankly, a shocking state of affairs.
Your contempt for the importance of stories, for the need for sustaining and nourishing cultural narratives in favour of one more big fight scene and another big explosion is reprehensible. Your incessant drive to dumb down the most powerful story-telling medium we possess equally so. Your big budget bullying of smaller films out of the cinemas is frankly vile. You’re helping to shape a generation that will define a “good movie” as how many car crashes it contained, how many building got demolished, how big the muscles on the hero is and how many people get casually killed.
Cheers, Hollywood!
Here’s an idea: Could you start making films again? You used to be pretty good at it, to be fair. But if that is beyond you, could you at least give some space for independent filmmakers to breathe? So the rest of us who aren’t fascinated by your current products can head off to see something else at the cinema instead?
It would really be very highly appreciated.
Best Regards
Dave Ollerton
