What Fresh Hell Is This?
Posted on July 21, 2010
Filed Under Walk of Shame
First came the news that there’s now a service that evaluates the merits of a script via a database which compares the script’s “creative elements” to previously successful films in the same genre to assess how audiences might react to specific scenes, as we well as to identify its target demographic and box office potential (read more here, if you can stand it.) So any script that has the temerity to be fresh and original is screwed.
But wait, there’s more! Now we hear that Disney will not finance films costing more than $100 million (and they’re not interested in funding ones that cost much less) unless the project can demonstrate its characters can be sold around the world as merchandize (although with that kind of money at stake, you can see their point.) Big budget films will not be made unless they appeal to TV, DVD, online games, theme park attractions and merchandise including clothing, toys and household goods like children’s lunchboxes, notebooks, throw pillows, etc.
The Future of Film?
Not coincidentally, specialty film division Miramax, whose releases do not easily lend themselves to being turned into theme park rides (Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own Horrors?), is up for sale.
I realize that all movies perform a delicate balancing act between creative inspiration and commercial product, but having the merchandizing tail wagging the inspiration dog is surely the path to dull, formulaic films that audiences will stay away from. Although maybe audiences are so brainwashed now that they will respond to films crafted with Pavlovian precision to push their buttons (see para 1.)
To put it another way, when Pixar created the original Toy Story 15 years ago, I don’t think its potential as a video game was uppermost in their minds. And before the first film proved to be such a hit, you can bet Disney executives would have said, “a cowboy doll? Nah, no kid’s going to be interested in that.” Indeed, when Ol’ Walt himself created Steamboat Willie, I don’t believe he was thinking “what kind of character would look really good on a lunchbox?”
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One Response to “What Fresh Hell Is This?”
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Fresh hell, indeed.
“The script will then be analysed for ‘playability’…”
“Next up is the ‘marketability’ stage…”
“Finally, the firm will summarise the script for quantitative validation… ”
Pass the gun.
One of the major contributing factors that helped ease me out of a world of corporate skullduggery to focus on writing full time (and thereby achieve a level of spiritual harmony that had been distinctly lacking) was the increasing abuse my ears and eyes were receiving on a day-to-day basis with similar mind-numbing stomach-churning language & formulae that was flooding every corner of an industry I used to be proud to work in. To see it now permeating the upper echelons of the movie making business *to that extent* makes me feel sad.
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