John Carter, In Retrospect, Was Pretty Good - And Where Hollywood Has Gone Wrong

I think it's worth revisiting this movie every now and again, especially now considering the dismal box office summer.

John Carter was no Citizen Kane, and for that matter lacked what Star Wars had (despite the former being much less of a B movie than the latter). But it wasn't bad.

There was a plot. The actors were competent and pretty. The setting and mystery was fun. The action was good. Even the philosophy was comprehensible and interesting and sufficiently light.

Obviously the marketing was garbage.

But, why didn't this movie do better?

I think Cowboys and Aliens is an apt comparison. This movie was also "competent". I feel as if its failure lies mostly with the fact that audiences in America are so coddled that they struggle with genre-bending features. I knew someone who vigorously complained about this movie, but had never seen it. Why? Because what do cowboys have to do with aliens.

My impression is that 80s audiences would have stampeded into theatres to see a feature about John Wayne fighting ET.

John Carter faced a similar flaw, and was essentially Cowboys and Aliens. Who was John Carter? A cowboy? What was this Mars, like some fantasy place? Mars is where flying saucers and ray guns come from. The premise was over the heads of audiences. You'd have to explain that in the 1900s fiction writers didn't know as much about science and Mars, and this setting comes out of that.

Whoa, whoa, too much for Americans.

This submission, however, is not simply another critique of American tastes. Rather, I wonder if Hollywood isn't to blame.

Hollywood makes reboots and sequels because that's what audiences go to. John Carter is a perfect example of why they don't bother with original stuff. And yet, the sequel/reboot craze has led to a box office disaster. So, on the one hand can Hollywood be blamed for audience tastes? They have tried originality. I think in a subtle way, they are to blame.

The problem is marketing, or rather over-production (too much corporate interference that is). Marketing is meant to make us want to see a movie. But, subtly, it also shapes our understanding of why we would want to see a movie.

Hollywood takes cheap shots at our sex drives, our nostalgia, our stupid desire for action. Because these cheap shots sometimes produce blockbuster results, Hollywood overdoes the effort. And audiences have slowly lost sight of what might be good about a movie other than these "base instinct" draws.

Have you ever been dragged to a show, a movie, or play that you wish you didn't have to attend, but you want to please the person who invited you? Have you ever left realizing that you actually rather enjoyed the thing?

I think, audiences don't necessary know what they would or would not like all the time, especially when it comes to originality. Hollywood has trained us to think that if we're going to like a movie, it has to be for certain reasons. In the process, they've dulled our ability to perceive why we might like movies for other reasons. I think that's the problem.

John Carter suffered from that. It would have done well in the 80s. I think because people were sick of the "edgy" dark movies of the 70s. Edginess wasn't "good", it's just that every so often it triggered basic instincts that led to blockbuster sales. Again, in a few cases only. So Hollywood chased the big dollars, and missed out on the reasonable middle dollars. Audiences tired of edginess turned away from Hollywood, and to science fiction, comics, Dungeons and Dragons, and so forth. So once Hollywood realized they could make movies out of those replacements for their own edgy crap, they had the huge hits of the era.

Hollywood, in effect, has to wean us off of "sequels". It has to produce more middle-budget original pieces from competent auteurs. They need to interfere less. They also need to hire people from outside their liberal bubble - hear me out!

I'm not political or conservative or anything, but can't we all admit Hollywood is in a cultural bubble? It seems like when producers do let writers and directors go wild, it's with guys like Aronofsky or Lindelof - two cranks who can do theoretically good work with producer oversight. I think there's this notion that producers will lose face in their own cocktail crowd culture if they don't pander to the values and tastes of that culture.

So open a studio in Georgia or Texas or Minnesota, hire people from YouTube or elsewhere, and build up a group of non-Hollywood auteurs. Once you have something good going, do middle budget original films.

Market them casually: here's what this movie's about, here's why it's interesting. No convoluted plots or weird trendy themes. Be straitforward with audiences. Charge half as much for tickets.

Hell, if they just made movie food more affordable and you could bring your family to see a feature and get a meal and pay $20 for a family of four to eat, as opposed to $60, then maybe people would come to movies more.

It's like a game of chicken between the studios, who can have the biggest blockbuster, and burn everything else down along the way. So you need $20 food to pay for the blockbuster, to draw the people, to make the $1 trillion.

Submitted September 17, 2017 at 04:52PM by benedictFocker http://ift.tt/2xKaWeC