Labor Day weekend marks the official end of Hollywood’s summer season, so time to do some analysis. Here’s a start from LAT movie blogger (24 Frames) Steven Zeitchik, focusing on how well specialty movies fared — or rather didn’t — this summer:
Summer — that elusive, seductive damsel exiting the bar after this weekend — tends to inspire a lot of things, including too many contemporary country singers to write bad songs. What it usually also does is get filmgoers to take a break from the male explosion extravaganzas and female star-driven dramedies to check out something smaller. lighter and more human, movies that people see because they discover them, not because they’re marketed into submission.The so-called specialty crossover hit has been a certainty in recent summers, when there’s reliably been a “Little Miss Sunshine” or a “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” to attract filmgoers. This year? Not so much.
The offbeat family dramedy “The Kids Are All Right” comes closest to earning the crossover crown — it’s grossed just over $19 million since being released in early July. For a $5-million acquisition of worldwide rights out of Sundance, that’s not a shabby investment for distributor Focus Features. But it’s hardly the blowout success of “Little Miss Sunshine,” a movie to which “Kids” has been compared but which grossed nearly $60 million, or even the quirky breakup dramedy “(500) Days of Summer,” which grossed $32 million last summer.
In only one other summer in the past decade did a specialty movie not crack the $20-million mark (it happened in 2007, when “Waitress” just missed the cut). “The Kids Are All Right” will probably make it to $20 million, but barely. And the Lisa Cholodenko film is actually the exception — there isn’t a single other specialty movie so far this year close to it. Many years there are multiple films. And sometimes there’s even one blowout one, a “Napoleon Dynamite” or, all the way at the upper end of the register, a “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” This year the well is dry.
Lack of quality product? The economic recession? Or perhaps this:
But it’s the simplest explanation that may be the truest: The number of financiers and distributors that might have produced and pushed these films are no longer doing business. The brothers Weinstein — who regularly churned out counterprogrammers earlier in the 00s, have been laying lower this year. Miramax and Bob Berney are off the scene. So are a lot of indie financing instruments. Sure, Fox Searchlight and Focus Features are still here as well-funded, infrastructure-heavy producers and distributors, but they’re increasingly the exception. Searchlight also took a rare pause form its usual crossover dominance this year as it released “Cyrus,” which grossed just over $7 million. (It did have the urban romantic comedy “Just Wright” gross $21 million, though that doesn’t fit the typical definition of a specialty film.)
In other words, fall-out from the demise some years back of several of the major studios’ specialty labels. The point there isn’t that more indie-type movies aren’t getting produced, but rather the outfits that have big distribution networks and significant marketing resources — namely the major studios — aren’t in the business that much right now (with the exceptions, as noted above, of Fox Searchlight and Focus Features). As Zeitchik puts it in his article:
When the financial crisis hit a few years ago, we heard often that indie films would now be left in indie hands, making indie money. This summer, we began to see it.
Thoughts?
How depressing that " more human " stories that don't feature massive explosions or mega-stars are deemed 'speciality'.
Ironically, more often than not it's these 'off-beat' films that end up on 'greatest film' lists of the future 9eg Little Miss Sunshine) – not the mainstream stuff. So, if less of them are making their way to our screens, does this mean that when, in twenty years time,we look back, there'll be a huge blank at the beginning of the 21st century? It also seems to me that with the on-going develpoment of the digital media there must come a time when the stranglehold of the distributors can be finally broken. A new , independent chain of cinemas , even. I hope so for all our sakes.
Lazzard, you've hit the point where rubber meets the road: distribution. It's one thing to make smaller, more character-driven movies; it's quite another to get anyone to see them, even if they're good to great without some sort of (typically) studio distribution system.
Things are happening on that front and I've been tracking some of them over the last 2 years on this blog. It's interesting to track projects like Edward Burns' new movie Nice Guy Johnny because they are bypassing a theatrical release entirely.
I used to work in indie distribution and I have to disagree with the assessment that it's a lack of well-funded distribution companies rather than a lack of marketable product causing this supposed "summer slump."
If this were true, it would imply that there are a bunch of indies out there capable of grossing $20M that simply weren't picked up. If that's the case, which films? We know what's out there – just scour the major festivals of the past year. I can't think of a single film that "would have" done big business but was ignored because there aren't enough studio specialty divisions any more.
The reason the studio divisions shuttered is that indie box office has been steadily declining, and this summer is just further evidence of that. And, more importantly, whether there are one or two or three breakout indie hits a summer is not an accurate gauge of the indie box office as a whole.
The real question is why the indie box office has been declining in general, and this article says nothing about it. I'd argue that articles like this, that take one summer or one year and try to make an empirical argument about a "trend" in the film industry are usually pretty far from accurate.
My own cynical opinion is that Americans are just getting stupider and therefore want more simplistic entertainment. Sophisticated indie films just can't compete with Hollywood blockbusters and reality TV. I'd even argue that the indies that do cross over aren't really representative of sophisticated independent filmmaking – are "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" or "Slumdog Millionaire" or "Little Miss Sunshine" really that different from typical crowd-pleasing Hollywood fare? Not in my opinion.