Posts tagged film

A troubling conundrum: Is it really possible that the better Pixar becomes, the less box office and merchandising potential its films have? However, I think the deeper story here is the pressure that comes from a public liquidity event. Pixar's profitability is a "problem" mostly because of the valuation Disney placed on Pixar when purchasing it for $9B. Selling out is not always bad, but be careful whom you sell out to, and for how much.

re: business, film, pixar, pop culture

Andy:

Adjusted for inflation, Pixar’s films have generated a combined $2.65 billion at North American theaters, a spectacular showing. “Finding Nemo” in 2003 was the high point, selling $405.6 million in tickets.

Pixar’s last two films, “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille,” have been the studio’s two worst performers, delivering sales of $224 million and $216 million respectively, according to Box Office Mojo, a tracking service. Attendance for Pixar films has also dropped sharply over the years, suggesting that ticket price inflation helped prop up overall sales for “Wall-E” and “Ratatouille.”

Retailers, meanwhile, see slim merchandising possibilities for “Up.” Indeed, the film seems likely to generate less licensing revenue than “Ratatouille,” until now the weakest Pixar entry in this area. (“Cars” wears the merchandising crown, with sales of more than $5 billion.) . . .

Perhaps Wall Street would not care so much if Pixar seemed to care a little more. The co-director of “Up,” Pete Docter — who also directed “Monsters Inc.” — said in a recent question and answer session with reporters that the film’s commercial prospects never crossed his mind. “We make these films for ourselves,” he said. “We’re kind of selfish that way.”

John Lasseter, a co-founder of Pixar and now Disney’s chief creative officer, routinely says in interviews that marketability is not a factor in decisions about what projects to pursue. Instead of ideas that feel contemporary, he aims for stories that are rooted in the ages.

“Quality is the best business plan” is one of Mr. Lasseter’s favorite lines.

I, too, am quite a fan of Whit Stillman's films (despite the fact that they somehow make me simultaneoulsy think, "Dude, I'm such a WASP," and "Dude, I'm so not a WASP"). To my mind the best of the trio is The Last Days of Disco, though who wouldn't also love a movie (Barcelona) whose IMDB reviews include one called—accurately, no less—"The Bible Dancer and the American Deer."

re: banter, film, horizons of the possible, humor, virtue, wit

Nate:

Because Stillman praises convention and doesn’t shun virtue, there are more options open to him.  It turns out looking at convention and virtue only through a perspective that disparages them can seriously limit your stock of references.  Stillman’s characters can move from examining Jane Austen or War and Peace to analyzing The Graduate from the perspective of the make-out king.  Stillman doesn’t feel the need for hip references; he simply explores his interests, and they are fascinating.

If praising virtue leads to creativity, this is good news for contemporary artists because it opens up more options for them.  Stillman is proof that virtue doesn’t have to lead to canned narratives.  Virtue in a world where it is largely misunderstood is fuel for drama, irony and a whole lot of cinematic fun.

For some reason the LA Times has categorized this story under "Science & Medicine." Curiouser and curiouser.

re: branding, charity, copyright, cultural worlds, entertainment, film, gold, idols, money

Nate:

And the Oscar for best Hollywood courtroom drama goes to . . . the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The golden statuette was awarded Monday by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury, which ruled that if Mary Pickford’s heirs want to sell it, they have to offer it to academy officials for $10 instead of auctioning it off for as much as $800,000. Academy leaders took a Rancho Mirage woman, her daughter and a cousin to court after the women announced plans to sell the Oscar presented in 1930 to the silent-movie star known as “America’s sweetheart” and donate the proceeds to charity.

Kevin Kelly explores the new visual literacy, noting how the new people of the screen are creators, not just consumers, of visual content. (I can't decide whether I'm pleased or disappointed that he didn't use the word I coined a few years ago, visualcy.) I am not sure he has fully wrestled, however, with one key difference between words and moving images: moving images by their very nature take time. No matter how skilled the editor, assembling a compelling sequence of shots requires an order of magnitude more time than is required for a skilled writer to call up a compelling sequence of words. So I am not persuaded that we will ever reach the holy grail of visual availability that Kelly envisions . . . and that may be a good thing.

re: film, kevin kelly, mashups, photography, technology and change, video, visualcy

Andy:

The overthrow of the book would have happened long ago but for the great user asymmetry inherent in all media. It is easier to read a book than to write one; easier to listen to a song than to compose one; easier to attend a play than to produce one. But movies in particular suffer from this user asymmetry. The intensely collaborative work needed to coddle chemically treated film and paste together its strips into movies meant that it was vastly easier to watch a movie than to make one. A Hollywood blockbuster can take a million person-hours to produce and only two hours to consume. But now, cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, Photoshop, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images. To the utter bafflement of the experts who confidently claimed that viewers would never rise from their reclining passivity, tens of millions of people have in recent years spent uncountable hours making movies of their own design. Having a ready and reachable audience of potential millions helps, as does the choice of multiple modes in which to create. Because of new consumer gadgets, community training, peer encouragement and fiendishly clever software, the ease of making video now approaches the ease of writing.

This is not how Hollywood makes films, of course. A blockbuster film is a gigantic creature custom-built by hand. Like a Siberian tiger, it demands our attention — but it is also very rare. In 2007, 600 feature films were released in the United States, or about 1,200 hours of moving images. As a percentage of the hundreds of millions of hours of moving images produced annually today, 1,200 hours is tiny. It is a rounding error.

We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth, a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The handcrafted Hollywood film won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming food chain below — YouTube, indie films, TV serials and insect-scale lip-sync mashups — and not just the tiny apex of tigers. The bottom is where the action is, and where screen literacy originates.