Ha. Ha ha. Oooh, that title must be a typo. It should say, “Jordan Lapp is Watching Almost Famous”. Wish fulfilment much?
Anyways, “Almost Famous”, the movie by Cameron Crowe, is making me think of the state of movies today. I can’t mention this movie to friends without someone telling me how awesome it is. I suppose I was in a weird place the first time I watched it, but it really left an impression on me. Every time it’s playing anywhere, I just have to watch it.
It’s an amazing film, and even when it was released it got great reviews (it currently enjoys an 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes). I was going to write about how the studio system today wouldn’t know how to market this movie. I was going to write about the fact that it had no A-list stars and no special effects, and wasn’t 3D, thus would fall between the cracks. Unfortunately, it turns out that it didn’t even break even at the time. The budget was a stunning 60 million dollars, and it made back 47 million, so maybe even the studio system back then had no idea what to do with it. Maybe the budget was way too high in the first place. Today, this movie would either star Justin Bieber or have a budget close to 4 million and be released direct to DVD.
It’s discouraging when movies like Almost Famous fail to break even while lesser offerings make back four times their budget. I was trying to figure out what this says about the mentality of the movie going public, but I suppose it says more about the state of marketing these days. Every movie has a few good lines of dialogue, and if you splice them in with enough shiny special effects you can fool anyone into paying to see a movie once. Every time I see this trailer I take three steps towards the video store, even though everyone on Earth thinks it’s like two and a half hours of flushing your head down the toilet.
So, moral of this post, for my movie, tentatively entitled “Deeper”, I’m going to try and cut a damn good trailer.
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Wait…2010 made 4 times it’s budget? You’re kidding, right? That movie is possibly one of the worst movies ever made next to an Uwe Boll film…
Just think about it. Who exactly are you supposed to root for in 2012? The father, mother, and son pass off the death of the plastic surgeon/husband as “not a big deal” while the fat Russian guy tries to redeem himself in the end, only to remind us that for the entire film he’s been a rich, pompous douche with absolutely no respect for anyone (his kids too). And don’t get me started on all the politicians and daughters of politicians…
Bleh…
Roland Emmerich doesn’t make movies, he makes amazing images with stuff in between them.
I mean, how iconic is that image of the giant spaceship hovering over the skyscraper just before the big blue laser goes off (Independence Day)?
Trailers only show these amazing scenes, not the “story” in between, so Emmerich movies look amazing, while movies like Almost Famous look unexciting. Sometimes I think the perfection of “Trailer theory” is destroying filmmaking.
I absolutely love that film. Amazed to read that the budget was 60 mil, though–I can’t fathom what for. Back in the day, that kind of money got Empire Strikes Back made!
The difference between Independence Day and 2012, though, is that the former has a plot, characters you can root for, and a point. 2012 is just a meaningless waste of film.
Nick,
Yeah, I couldn’t figure out what that budget bought either. 60 million seems absurd since the biggest “name” at the time was Jason Lee. Like I said, if the budget had been 10 million, the movie would have turned a handsome profit with very little difference in quality.
I agree that 2012 was pretty terrible.
As far as scenes go, the saber tooth tiger scene from 10,000 BC was memorable also, and we all remember the trippy “stargate” scene from the movie with the same name.
I think Emmerich just cares more about special effects than about story, and who can blame him? His movies make money, and that allows him to make more films. A director who doesn’t make money very quickly doesn’t direct.
Excellent moral Jordan!
The moral I gained from your post is that I should probably see Almost Famous someday.
60 million wasn’t the original budget for Almost Famous. From what I recall, Crowe went *over*budget by about 15 million & really annoyed Dreamworks. If he’d stayed on budget, the film would still have been an extraordinarily expensive art house film, but it probably wouldn’t have been labeled a financial disappointment. As it was, the film was labeled a financial disaster before Oscar season hit, which is really the time for an art film to do well, anyway. My guess is that AF went on to to do perfectly well on the arthouse circuit and in domestic DVD sales.
As for 2012… *sigh*
But keep in mind that the summer tentpole movies are actually held to a much higher standard when it comes to box office returns. Given how much is spent on marketing them, a summer movie like 2012 needs to make back 3 times its budget in order to be profitable – so 2012 did well, but probably not as well as you might think from the “4x its budget” line.
Arthouse films are (usually) competing in a different league: they aren’t *expected* to make as much money as a Big Summer Tentpole Movie, so they get much smaller marketing budgets and thus have smaller extra-budget costs to recoup.
A good art movie (like AF) ought to pay for at least some of its own advertising by being nominated for awards; on that score, Crowe’s film was a success. And if you recall Hartwell’s speech about the value of publishing libraries, the same rule applies with movies: 10 years from now, the studio is going to be selling more copies of Almost Famous than it will of 2012. Ditto with 20 years from now, and 40: as a well-received film, AF is going to continue as a small but constant moneymaker, whereas 2012 is a flash-in-the-pan spectacle with FX that will be outdated in a few months’ time.
So never fear. There’s still a market for Good Films out there. I could go on about the Art House Bubble and the unrealistic expectations put on AF, but I won’t.
Siobhan! Long time no talk!
I didn’t know that about AF, thanks for the info! The 47 million figure I got from Wikipedia, which usually includes DVD sales, but who knows? If it didn’t… it’s probably still operating at a loss. But your point about longevity is well-taken. AF looks (and plays) as good today as the year it was shot.
As for 2012, the wide release it got probably cost $35 million for distribution, with another $100 million spent on an advertising campaign (about equal to what was spent on Inception). A hollywood editor I met at a directing workshop said that the rule of thumb is that a feature must make back double its budget to be successful, so Emmerich far surpassed that.
It’s a great point that AF can be considered by the studio as a “prestige project”. I never really thought of that. Personally, I hope not to have to rely on that. Nolan makes great films that make money–Raimi does too. Hopefully I can emulate their success.
And, P.S., I would love to hear about the Art House Bubble!