EstablishedOn Movies
(This is the third in a series of four articles responding to Stephen King’s EW piece)
King expresses concern that good movies like The Hurt Locker get fairly limited distribution while crappy behemoths like Transformers 2 get massive releases. And he sees little of quality on the horizon.
How can good movies survive and grow in this type of world?
I actually think now is a great time for high quality pseudo-independent movies. As King points out, The Hurt Locker was made for $11 million. While not pocket change, this is pretty cheap for a movie with explosions in it. District 9 was made on a budget of $30 million. Again, by any measure, this is not a small amount of money — however you have to keep in mind that District 9 was a top rate science fiction movie with elaborate effects throughout. When you compare to the $200 million that Transformers 2 cost, these movies are bargains.
There will always be the big, overblown spectacle movies. From Cleopatra to Transformers, we will always have room for the broad movies with giant budgets that everyone has to see. What I’m encourage by is the ability for smaller budget movies to tell stories with as large a scale as the blockbusters.
This leaves us with the concern about the size of a film’s release. King says that Transformers 2 opened on 4200 screens. The Hurt Locker was surely a fraction of this. But to me, this point matters little. So long as good movies are getting released (and cheaper budgets ensure they will), they will find their audience – some at the theater and then a greater number on home video. I don’t think we can use number of screens as any kind of metric for how much the public cares about high quality filmmaking. The general public watches movies as entertainment, not art. As much as we wish the public had the taste of movie lovers, it’s just not so. And as long as film fans have plenty of great movies to go see in the theater and to watch at home, then we need not worry about the death of great movies. If anything, us film fans should do a better job of spreading the good word about top quality movies so they can break out into the mainstream.