Conservative film blogger Dirty Harry is often best ignored when he’s aggressively railing against the liberal Hollywood elite, but when he offers a faux-populist view of filmgoing that’s so obstinately limited in scope that it’s actually potentially dangerous, I have to say something.
The gist: the cursed Hollywood elite is once again pushing movies with purely elite appeal for awards, and audiences are not responding to these films because after years of reading reviews written by partisan elitists who are out of touch with What The People Want, they no longer trust film critics. An excerpt:
From early predictors, it looks as though the ever-widening disconnect between Hollywood and their audience will reach into 2008. The Visitor, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Rachel Getting Married… Any of these on your radar? Any of these captured your imagination?…what a sad statement that the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office.
Dirty Harry’s commenters take it from there; the basic consensus is that if any of the above named films get the Best Picture nomination that should rightfully go to The Dark Knight, why they’ll … become really indignant about the tyranny of the liberal media? Not watch the Oscars? Boycott movie theaters? So, pretty much status quo, right?
Anyway. First things first: that Variety story he bases the post on is three weeks old, which is a lifetime in the prognostication game. And let’s leave aside the fact that neither Slumdog nor the Wrestler have opened anywhere yet, and that only a very small percentage of the population would admit to having their “imagination captured” by a Woody Allen film, even though Vicky is still on almost 100 screens almost three months after its release and is currently about a million dollars away from being Allen’s highest-grossing film in 22 years.
Regardless: Dirty Harry chooses to extrapolate two films named in that story as evidence that “the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office”: Rachel Getting Married and The Visitor. I’m far more of a fan of one of these films than the other, but Harry’s assessment of audience “indifference” is misleading for both. As is common for him, he willfully refuses to acknowledge that expectations and accounting are different for films that open on 3 screens and then expand, than they are for films that roll right out into 3,000.
So, some numbers:
(All of these statistics come from Box Office Mojo)
In the five weeks Rachel has been in theaters, its release has grown steadily from weekend to weekend, but has not yet expanded above 133 screens (a little less than what The Dark Knight has dropped to after 16 weeks in release). The film opened to an extremely high per screen average (9 screens, $32,597 on each), and actually saw significant increases in total gross from weekend to weekend during its second, third and fourth weekends in release. On Halloween weekend, Rachel’s fifth in theaters, most widely released films saw drops from 30-60% from the previous weekend, because nobody goes to the movies on Halloween; Rachel dropped just 14%.
Like the film or hate it (and your lean one way or another could very well be partially ideological), you’d have to be insane to look at numbers like this for limited release film and read “indifference.” Likewise, The Visitor’s $9.5 million domestic gross was the product of a slow build over 26 weekends in theaters (never more than 270 at a time); the film undoubtedly benefited from peer-to-peer word-of-mouth, which means it must have captured somebody’s imagination, even if it wasn’t mine.
Even if you buy Dirty Harry’s argument that no one cares about these films because they haven’t made $100 million dollars, such an argument opens up a new can of worms: what is the purpose of awards, and what is their rightful relationship to, on the one hand, commercial success, and on the other, critical praise? To say that a movie which built an audience via word-of-mouth over half a year in theaters was met with “indifference” by audiences because it never played a multiplex (and thus was never seen by non-curious film goers) is insane — I don’t even like the movie, but I can’t deny that The Visitor has been one of the biggest hits of a year from a truly indie perspective, and that its success has been entirely dependent on capturing the imagination of a certain audience.
The Dirty Harry argument is based on the philosophy that the job of a critic is to affirm popular tastes rather than try in good faith to expand them, and that the role of the Oscars is to salute movies that captured the momentary zeitgeist rather than to reserve a place in history for films and roles that have the potential to capture imaginations not all in one massive opening weeked burst, but slowly and steadily for years to come. Critics have not always been good at influencing audience tastes for the better, and the Oscar voters haven’t always made the best decisions in the interest of posterity (cough, Million Dollar Baby). But if an Oscar nomination (or even a win) ensures that a couple of films a year which didn’t have the benefit of Dark Knight-sized distribution and marketing budgets will be found later on DVD, how is that a bad thing?
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth