It’s the franchise, not the face
James Bond and Snoopy are coming to the rescue of the North American box office this weekend.
Their arrival in their respective blockbuster films, Spectre and The Peanuts Movie, signals a halt to weeks of films that were expected to enliven multiplexes and spur Oscar talk but instead did the opposite.
More than this, it serves as an object lesson in the reality of 21st-century movie-going.
It’s the franchise that pulls crowds in, not celebrity faces.
Spectre, the 24th Bond film, is expected to pull in upward of $75 million (U.S.) this weekend at theatres in Canada and the U.S., while family friendly counter-programmer The Peanuts Movie is headed for at least $40 million, according to the latest estimates.
Spectre has already set records with last week’s early rollout in the U.K. and parts of Europe.
It’s great news for film studios that have seen such star-driven vehicles as Our Brand Is Crisis, Burnt, Rock the Kasbah, Steve Jobs, Suffragette, Truth and other high-profile pictures perform below expectations this fall, some seriously so.
The political satire Our Brand Is Crisis had the worst wide opening of any film in Sandra Bullock’s long career, its $3.3million take coming in lower than the $4.7 million of Two If by Sea from 1996, her previous low point.
The $5.1 million for celebrity chef drama Burnt represents the second major flop this year for Bradley Cooper, who earlier saw his high-flying summer comedy Aloha crash and burn.
Rock the Kasbah, a comedy that sends Bill Murray to Afghanistan, opened two weeks ago to some of the most withering reviews of his career.
Co-starring Bruce Willis, Kate Hudson and Zooey Deschanel, the film exploded on contact with a paltry $1.5-million take, failing to crack the Top 10. It dropped by nearly 80 per cent last weekend, a huge tumble.
Meanwhile, Oscar hopefuls Steve Jobs, Suffragette and Truth all opened to less than stellar business, despite the presence of A-list talent and festival buzz. (The Tom Hanks drama Bridge of Spies may be the exception that proves the rule and it’s from Steven Spielberg, a bankable director.)
The casualty list goes on, but a hard fact remains. Movie stars no longer pull people into theatres; pre-sold franchises do.
The multitudes flocking to Spectre aren’t going because of Daniel Craig, although he’s a popular James Bond. They’re going because the 007 series remains a power pop culture phenomenon, 53 years and 24 films later. People know what to expect from a Bond movie and they like it, with no real concern about who carries the licence to kill, as six successive James Bonds have proved.
Similar fan dynamics drove the dino-thriller reboot Jurassic World to stellar results this past summer and they will send into the stratosphere ticket receipts for the Dec. 18 rollout of Star Wars: Episode 7 — The Force Awakens.
The Peanuts Movie is just the first film in an expected franchise. But it features beloved characters Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Woodstock, Lucy, Linus and others in a story illustrat- ed and voiced with scrupulous fidelity to the memory of Charles Schulz’s comic strip classics and their TV spinoffs.
What isn’t drawing people to theatres this fall, and rarely does so anymore, is the lure of a star who sells a movie regardless of its quality or content. Sci-fi drama The Martian is a career peak for actor Matt Damon, but the film is based on a bestselling novel and it’s directed by hitmaker Ridley Scott.
I put this situation to David Thomson, a San Francisco movie critic and author whose The New Biographical Dictionary of Film is a definitive text for celebrity assessments. (He has a new book arriving next week, How to Watch a Movie.)
“I don’t think people have the same sort of reverence for movie stars now and I don’t think there are very many actors who are surefire draws so that a huge audience will come out every time for them,” he replied.
“I think that they know and we know that we pick and choose our films very carefully. If a film doesn’t sort of line up in our minds happily, if it doesn’t seem to have those elements that we want to go see, then it’s no good.”
There are still movie stars, largerthan-life people such as Johnny Depp, George Clooney and Angelina Jolie. But they tend to do best at the box office when they’re part of a franchise, such as Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Clooney’s Ocean’s Eleven and Jolie’s Kung Fu Panda series. At Cannes in May, screen legend Catherine Deneuve blamed the decline of star power on the rise of social media. The constant online focus on celebrities and their foibles “doesn’t allow people to dream anymore,” she said. “To be a star, that requires glamour and secrecy.”
Thomson agrees with Deneuve’s assessment.
“I think she’s spot on. The whole of celebrity culture as it exists on the Internet has done so much to sharpen our almost vengeful glee if these people make fools of themselves.
“So many dark and dirty stories come out now about stars because they are not protected by studios in the way they used to be.
“Once upon a time a star was a studio product, and even if something horrible had happened in a star’s life, the studio would take great care to conceal it so that your whole image of that star was not spoiled. That’s not the case these days and a lot of stars have suffered from that. We don’t respect them in the same way.”
We still go to the movies, although increasingly it’s not because we’re drawn by unique people, but rather by familiar stories and characters of franchise fare like James Bond, Star Wars and Peanuts. phowell@thestar.ca