Hollywood’s Obsession with Blockbusters

Summer, in my opinion, is the worst season for movies. Sequels, reboots, franchises, superhero sagas, action flicks—big-budget blockbusters just aren’t my thing. Take a look at the 2013 May through August lineup: Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, Star Trek into Darkness, The Wolverine, 300: Rise of an Empire… The list goes on and on. In Hollywood today, bigger is better and repeatability is king.

But these movies are the industry’s lifeblood, and audiences seem to love them. According to Box Office Mojo, a website that tracks ticket sales, the 10 top-grossing movies worldwide in 2012 were animated films, action sequels, or franchises, and they propelled the major studios to record profits.

So, to use superhero parlance, are blockbusters a force for good or evil? After reading books from several experts on the topic—a lover of big-budget movies, a producer, and a film critic—I’m torn.

First let’s take a close look at an ultra-expensive blockbuster that crashed and burned. Michael D. Sellers’s John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood chronicles Disney’s 2012 release of a movie that cost more than $250 million to make and $100 million to market and then bombed at the box office, forcing the company to take a $200 million write-off. This came as a big surprise, because the movie seemed destined for success. As Sellers notes, the source material, from a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, was incredibly rich—in fact, Burroughs’s writing had been a big influence on both the Star Wars franchise and Avatar. The director, Andrew Stanton, was a Pixar whiz, perfectly capable of delivering the goods. And the lead actor, Taylor Kitsch, was a respected up-and-coming talent. The movie even played well at test screenings. But Disney failed to create buzz and galvanize a fan base.

Of course, the studio was fine. Another of its 2012 blockbusters, The Avengers, raked in $1.5 billion worldwide, generating 43% of Disney’s gross revenue. By now we all know that this is how Hollywood hedges its bets: Throw money at enough of these movies, and one will surely hit it big, making you a crazy amount of profit, which helps you forget the failures. The Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse has spent years researching uber-competitive, winner-take-all markets in which companies earn the vast majority of their profits with only a couple of successful products. (Her book Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, forthcoming from Henry Holt, is likely to shed more light on the issue.)

For now, we can turn to the producer Lynda Obst’s Sleepless in Hollywood: Tales from the New Abnormal in the Movie Business, an inside account of the industry at work today. Obst explains the importance of foreign markets to its current strategy. The fact is that up to 70% of a movie’s revenue can come from overseas. And which U.S. offerings play well in other countries? Blockbusters. Why? No other country can create movies on the same scale. Dramas, romantic comedies, genre pictures—studios around the world can make those. But only Hollywood has the technology and the talent (including world-famous celebrities) to churn out nine-figure spectacles. So although Ice Age: Continental Drift may seem like a lame rehash, the franchise’s foreign box-office numbers are impressive: The first installment grossed $207 million, the second $460 million, the third $690 million, and the fourth $716 million. Even John Carter made close to $210 million outside the United States.

“With all these tentpoles, franchises, reboots, and sequels, is there still room for movies in the movie business?”

Obst, the producer of Sleepless in Seattle and a host of other “movie movies,” as she calls them, is naturally worried about all this profit chasing. As studios become obsessed with building multimovie franchises with the basic plots, unsophisticated dialogue, and familiar characters that appeal mainly to teenage boys and foreigners, they’re funding fewer dramas and comedies than they once did. The executives Obst interviewed confirmed her fears: They feel that the financials are forcing their hands.

The film critic David Thomson is equally concerned about this trend. If you look back through movie history, as he does in The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, you’ll see that the industry’s most fertile and creative periods weren’t driven by blockbusters; they were fueled by filmmakers who had the budgets and freedom to contribute new styles and techniques to the movie mainstream. Think of iconic directors like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock—or, more recently, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola—who made artistically daring movies (even sequels, in the case of The Godfather) while also racking up ticket sales. For decades this was the Hollywood way, and Thomson laments and rages against its passing.

My first inclination was to do the same. But looking at the current movie landscape—across all seasons, not just the summer—I don’t think the situation is as dire as Thomson and Obst depict. After all, Hollywood is still innovating—even in some action films. Look no further than the special effects and sound wizardry in Avatar and Hugo. And even if the big studios are financing more John Carters than they are commercial art films with creative storytelling, others are filling the void. Harvey and Bob Weinstein have made a career of it, and newcomers such as Megan Ellison (the daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison), who personally financed Zero Dark Thirty and The Master, are stepping in.

I would like the big studios to do more, of course; we can’t depend on two hard-charging brothers and a generous tech heiress forever. But I think the movies are going to be OK. We cinephiles will still be able to get our fix in the autumn run-up to awards season; you blockbuster lovers can spend the summer eating popcorn and watching stuff blow up.