Blockbuster cosnpiracy
We've written about the incentive for any company to shoot for blockbusters rather than solid hits, starting in the move industry but now common to all media and much retailing. The quest for blockbusters and the attendant ad saturation have changed ways of doing business, and nowhere more than in the movie business, where it seems a so-called blockbuster is churned out every week, if only to be forgotten a few weeks later.
In a smart article on Salon.com ("Blahbusters," 5/28/2004), Charles Taylor explores the problem of why these blockbusters are getting increasingly boring and predictable. On the way, he demonstrates the tacit conspiracy between the movie industry and the news industry that keeps these leaden balloons in the air. His analysis fits well with our observations about the film industry.
The precipitous drop in audience, as we've pointed out, is a fact of life for all movies, particularly intended blockbusters.
Most movies, even very successful ones, begin to lose screens and show times by even the third weekend of their release, because of the sense that they no longer have the urgency they did when, say, the star was on the cover of Newsweek. It's a sense that's promulgated not just by the media's obsession with news cycles, but by the idea that all stories last a finite -- and increasingly short -- life span, that the public "tires" quickly.
That short moment of mind space and shelf space in the theaters is further abbreviated by the quick succession of secondary markets, all of which seem to be coming faster and faster as the danger of a film being forgotten by the time it make sit to DVD grows larger.
People also no longer care much if they miss a movie they wanted to see in the theaters since, in no time at all, there will be plenty of other ways for them to see it. In most major cities, you can buy a wretched bootleg of a new movie the day after it opens. Slightly higher up the aesthetic scale, you can see it on pay-per-view in your home or in a hotel (though probably shown in the wrong aspect ratio) a few months later, sometimes while it's still holding on at a few screens. And not long after that, the same movie that generated such hype just a while back will come out on DVD and be reduced to background noise projected on the screens of media megastores.
And the news media are willing conspirators in hyping for the opening of each new blockbuster. They act as "willing publicists." Since the definition of what is important for the week is determined by the massive promotion efforts of the studios for their about-to-open movies. The news media, in this case, instead of determining what is worthy of mind space, becoming echo chambers for those with the loudest adverting campaigns.
Fearful of losing readers by appearing out of the loop, newspapers and magazines (and, yes, online publications) give each weekend's new blockbuster the prime spot in its movie coverage -- no matter what the publication's critic has to say about it.
Of course, only a few companies that can afford the massive publicity budgets, where the budget for marketing outruns even the inflated costs of making movies with names like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Those are the big studios, which ties up the theaters and saturate the market, making sure there is little space, shelf or mind, left for any smaller movies.
