HIGHBROW HITS A LOW
While moviemakers bicker over their eligibility for awards on and off the small screen, audiences are all but consigning critical success to irrelevance with the millions of bums they put on cinema seats
Blockbusters eclipse art-house films at the box office
Here’s a fun experiment. Grab a bunch of friends and see how many of them watched The Post, The Shape of Water or any of the other Best Picture nominees that film critics waxed orgasmic over during award season. Next, ask them how many of the recent billion-dollar movies — like Avengers Infinity Wars, Black Panther or Star Wars The Last Jedi — they watched. Unless your friends are militant movie snobs, there’s a good chance that more of them will have seen the blockbuster franchise flicks than the critically acclaimed pieces of boutique cinema. While not unusual, the growing gulf in audience size combined with the increasing irrelevance of awards shows (all awards shows are haemorrhaging viewers) seems to suggest that there’s a portly woman singing — and by the sounds of it, she’s singing a requiem for the kind of arty farty movies that have tickled the sphincters of Academy Award judges for so long.
“In the US, the nine movies that were nominated [for Best Picture] in the Oscars played for roughly 635 million empty chairs during their whole run. The worst of them only sold 7% of their seats, so 93% of the time that movie was playing for an empty chair,” says Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos.
“The Academy Awards will have a challenge over time which will be ‘How do you stay relevant when the movies you are talking about are irrelevant to the audience?’”
AN EXPERIENCE
As with many industries, the internet has chucked out the old rule book and knotted many a knicker. The ballooning price of going to the movies means that people increasingly want more than just a movie, they want an ‘‘experience”. A big part of the appeal of Black Panther was pitching up at the theatre decked out in traditional African attire and seeing others do the same, whereas forking out a large slab of money to watch a movie like The Post, which had far less pop-culture hype, doesn’t seem worth it for non-cinephiles.
Streaming services have noticed this and have stepped in to fill the gap. For roughly the same price as a 3-D movie ticket, people can subscribe to Netflix or Showmax for a month and get an eternity of movies that can be watched without your pants on, and with snacks whose affordability isn’t contingent on you taking out a loan.
“The audience for most movies is at home. Now, there’s an experience for people who want to go out and that’s great but we want to be where the audience is,” says Sarandos.
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING
The shifting landscape has not stopped some from trying to swim against the tide. The
Cannes Film Festival (which started on
Tuesday) and Netflix are involved in an ongoing tiff over the eligibility of Netflix films to win awards at the festival. Part of Cannes’s requirements for winning an award include that the film should be screened in cinemas. A quirk in French law, however, means that a once a film is shown in French theatres, it cannot appear on Netflix for three years. These things
Not all critic candy is a box-office bust and not all franchise flicks make more money than the GDP of small island nations, but that’s usually how it goes. Here’s a look at the latest worldwide box-office earnings of seven films nominated for Best Picture vs the cinematic McDonald’s that is franchise films:
are not set in stone, though, and according to an article in The Atlantic, the Cannes Film Festival may reconsider its position.
The piece states: “By closing itself off to the streaming company, Cannes risks other, more flexible rivals (like Venice, Berlin, Toronto, and Telluride) becoming the place to premiere major works.”
Similarly, in order to be considered for an Oscar, a movie must have played for at least one day in one theatre in Los Angeles. Directorial luminaries like Steven Spielberg have even rather dismissively referred to original films that appear on streaming services as “TV movies”, and he questions whether they should qualify for an Oscar.
“I think defining a movie by how it is distributed is very flawed. What Steven was saying is that our movies technically qualify, which is a nonsense idea because if you qualify you qualify and if you don’t you don’t,” says Sarandos.
NUMBERS
The back and forth between people haggling for awards, however, means little to the average viewer. What does matter is the numbers because it’s the numbers that show what kind of impact a film will have on pop culture. Those numbers have ignored the smug self-stimulation that’s come to characterise critically acclaimed films. Bright, a movie that inspired endless paragraphs of creative derision, was, according to Nielsen, watched by 11 million people.
Avengers Infinity Wars made nearly $1-billion (R12.6-billion) in its first week in cinemas, and the latest addition to the Star Wars universe will undoubtedly end up funding a fleet of yachts for some studio executives. Despite their popularity, these films have the same chance of winning an Oscar for Best Picture as Daniel did of surviving when he entered the lions’ den.
Obviously none of this is the death knell for pretty boutique films that warm the cockles of a critic’s loins. Intense films about Russian spies and interspecies coital relations will always be made. They’re even necessary. But the world has changed and the films that once would have lured the casual viewer to their local SterKinekor are slipping into the realm of the highbrow “TV movie”.