China has used very strict, local lockdowns to deal with covid, but most places, most of the time there have been very normal over the last 18 months (death rate is about 1/500th of the US's). This has definitely grown/exaggerated China's share of the global cinema pie. Still, I'm a little staggered by some of these numbers, e.g., by just how much money there is to be made n China and what that fact must inevitably mean for the film business in the US and elsewhere.
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This is all very interesting and in a number of deep and profound ways, it seems to me.
Where to begin?
I'll try this.
In my formative years of the 60s and 70s, the true blockbusters were (a) blockbusters in AMERICA first (evidently the ratio was 80/20 as to foreign screens) and (b) measured usually by a gross somewhere between 80 million to the "magic" (and quite arbitrary) number of $100,000,000.
Few movies hit that mark. I think only The Sound of Music in the 60's came close(sorry, Psycho.) Then came a flurry in the 70's: The Godfather, The Exorcist, The Sting, Jaws, Star Wars. These were great, unique movies all and US moviegoers voted with their pocketbooks, lined up for a couple of blocks, came back again and again.
Fast forward a few decades. The international market rules; the US gross is always seen as a "subset" of that international release (though impressive enough, I suppose when FF9 can make $175 domestic), and fewer truly memorable classic movies are being made.
As if "Hollywood" (now a worldwide entity) cared about that when there was all this money to be made.
Over 822 million for a movie called "Hi Mom" that - to my mind -- has had no American release or presence at all? INDEED China is a driving force all by itself.
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ecarle (14979)
3 years ago
In the news has been this: China has evidently clamped down on how many(and which) American movies will be shown in China. The ol "bait and switch." US studios could count on Chinese audiences to take their grosses into the stratosphere and now China has pulled the rug out: not so many US films allowed it, an implied threat: maybe we don't let ANY in. (This has evidently -- along with continuing COVID -- prompted Tom Cruise to delay his Top Gun and M:I sequels further into 2022.)
I notice this, too: the trailers which used to be marked "MPAA" (Motion Picture Association of America) are now marked "MPA" (Motion Picture Association?) As a yank I will continue to separate patriotism from jingoism, but....c'mon. The movie may have originated in France(yes?) but Hollywood and its 100 years of classics were an American creation. Guys like Hitchcock and Wilder (and Wyler? and Lubitsch?) WENT to Hollywood to make it big.
Oh, well. The world moves on.
QT famously elected not to have Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shown in China because China demanded the deletion of the Bruce Lee scene. Good for him; he's rich enough, he doesn't need more money at the cost of his artistic freedom.
But others aren't so noble. The proliferation of comic book movies has at its core a certain lack of reality(natch), a certain sexlessness(even as the men and women in their skintight outfights have sex APPEAL), a certain evenness of plot that transfers everywhere.
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ecarle (14979)
3 years ago
I think one thing to note is that we can't say "the movies are dead" when a homegrown Chinese movie is making close to a billion dollars. We CAN say "the movies have changed."
I think another thing we can note is that a billion dollar gross ain't what it used to be. I was quite demoralized to read that "Joker" made a billion dollars. I think the Joker is a great character and that we have had two great Jokers(Jack and Heath.) I thought that Joaquin Phoenix's turn in the lead role was awful(and he won the Best Actor Oscar, natch) and the movie was overwrought and "anti-Joker" (the Joker AIN'T this over-emotional basket case putz), with a truly asinine climactic scene on Robert DeNiro's talk show.
But: a billion dollars, worldwide. Because: Joker. But also because a billion dollars is not too hard to make when the screens are worldwide (to which I say, a truly GOOD movie would have made a TRILLION dollars. Ha.)
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I realize now that age can't ever really be overcome in terms of "the world changing." My grandparents raised on MGM musicals and Jimmy Stewart Westerns had trouble coming to terms with Deliverance and A ClockworkOrange. Lovers of the "personal cinema of the 70's" couldn't come to terms with the "TV series as movies" commercialism of the 80's. Things change.
My fate as i get older is to watch as the movies become something that just aren't that varied and interesting anymore. To me. With my American background and sensibilities. (Note in passing: Psycho is about Phoenix, Arizona and Redding, California; The Godfather is a New York story; The Exorcist makes use of DC and Catholic Georgetown; The Sting is mainly about Chicago; Jaws is about Martha's Vineyard under another name; and Star Wars is about ...somewhere long ago and far away...which is where we are today.)
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ecarle (14979)
3 years ago
My list of "personal favorite per year"(and number twos) is still here, but the pickings are sure slim. In the COVID year 2020, I went for Psycho German Version 60th anniversary -- quite happily (I saw it at a movie theater.)
For 2021, I've got one major hope -- the Sopranos Movie ("The Many Saints of Newark") and one back up hope(Cry Macho -- Eastwood the Star at 91). Eastwood's movie is historic...but is it really a movie?
As for the Sopranos movie, its maker, David Chase has recently been interviewed on the irony of this film -- based on an HBO cable series -- being available on HBO Max the same day of release to theaters. Chase finds this very, very, ironic. In a bad way. He wanted to make a Sopranos MOVIE.
Me, I'm seeing both Cry Macho and the Sopranos movie...at the theater. HBO Max always breaks down on me, mid-movie.
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swanstep (2632)
3 years ago
I was quite demoralized to read that "Joker" made a billion dollars. I think the Joker is a great character and that we have had two great Jokers(Jack and Heath.) I thought that Joaquin Phoenix's turn in the lead role was awful(and he won the Best Actor Oscar, natch) and the movie was overwrought and "anti-Joker" (the Joker AIN'T this over-emotional basket case putz), with a truly asinine climactic scene on Robert DeNiro's talk show.
My reaction to Joker was a little different: *to me* it just felt so *very* derivative. It flat out splices together Taxi Driver and King of Comedy with the joke of De Niro now playing the Jerry Lewis character from the later (it also draws heavily for look and atmosphere on other gritty '70s films like French Connection), and Phoenix's character in fact reprises most of his character from his arthouse hitman-who-lives-with-his-mother flick You Were Never Really Here (2017). I kind of computed the rapturous reception Joker got as caused by the fact that most of its audience had never seen either Taxi Driver or King of Comedy or any other New Hollywood cinema. To that kid, whose whole prototype of what a movie is and can be is a Marvel blockbuster, Joker was the most radical, unhinged thing they'd ever seen - it was *all* new to them.
Compare the huge audiences and box office for things such as Black Swan and Get Out. I liked both these films but for me to appreciate how typical young viewers saw those films I have to kind of imagine how I would responded to the former if I'd never seen Repulsion or The Tenant or The Red Shoes or how I would have responded to the later if I'd never seen Rosemary's Baby or The Stepford Wives.
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swanstep (2632)
3 years ago
(Cont.) A very big hit in film or music is, necessarily, something that appeals to people in their teens and 20s, to people whose film or musical experience and horizon is typically quite limited. *Sometimes* something genuinely new-in-the-world has that kind of appeal, but the young's narrow horizons make them susceptible to stuff that's recycled from the past, that's only new-to-them. Youngsters can not just like but be *blown away* by Joker and Black Swan and Get Out in a way that older viewers often just can't be.
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