MARK JUDGE: Box office blues: Movies today are underwritten and have no emotional payoff.
Until recently, there was a level of literacy in comedies and action movies. Woody Allen’s films in the 1970s were funny, but also had long stretches of characters having philosophical conversations. Jaws, the 1970s smash that ushered in the blockbuster era, is based on a novel and has long, wonderful scenes that are nothing but dialogue. George Lucas famously mashed up literature, mythology, and psychology to create Star Wars. Whit Stillman’s great films from the 1990s, such as Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, feature young people trying to navigate their social worlds. The characters have read books. They are verbal and able to explore their interior lives with compelling perspicacity.
I still remember the comment my brother, an award-winning actor, made after seeing 1982’s action masterpiece Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: “That was Homeric.” Yes, The Road Warrior is about postapocalyptic car chases in the Australian desert. Yet there is a poetic voice-over throughout the entire film that holds it together and gives it depth. The film is well-written.
And more than 40 years later, Furiosa, a sequel to The Road Warrior, has been released. Like most movies these days, it is underwritten. Unsurprisingly, it has flamed out at the box office.
These days a film as literate and verbally rich as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is unthinkable. Yet I think audiences crave it. We want some intelligent payoff for our money.
As early as 1998, the late Todd Gitlin was telling the Washington Post:
“Insofar as American-based studios are making stuff for the global market, the stuff is dumbed down,” said Todd Gitlin, sociology professor at New York University and a cultural critic. “It’s not conscious, it’s just that the James Camerons [“Titanic’s” writer-director] who write the garbage dialogue are the successes. The relative crudity of the language is far from an impediment to exports. It’s a benefit.”
Said [then-Disney chairman Joe] Roth: “There’s no reason to think that the economics of movie business won’t turn out to be the same as Coca-Cola. It’s a product that’s uniformly imported. People will go see the ninth version of ‘The Bad News Bears.’ And I make them because people are going to see them.”
Until they don’t: Nelson Peltz Throws in the Towel On Basket-Case Groomer Corporation Disney, Sells Trian’s $Billion+ Stake In Disney.
Peltz’s proxy fight/hostile takeover bid had the perverse result of boosting Disney’s stock price even as Peltz was arguing the company should go back to producing family-friendly, uncontroversial, nonsexual material for children, instead of being a full-services groomer corporation. Because there was a fight for control of Disney, the stock was trading at an artificially high price — the stock had a control-of-the-company premium baked into the price.
Well, Peltz has now taken his own support away. He sold all of his (and his investment group Trian’s) stock for $120 per share, well above Disney’s current $100 per share value.
Like I said, there’s a control premium in the price of a big chunk of stock.
The rest of Disney shareholders won’t be enjoying that premium. They’ll see the stock lose value as Disney’s losing streak continues and no more White Knights will try to save it.
I hope all that Weimar-esque political activism was worth it for them.
Related: Fear not! A more intellectually rigorous script will finally soon be on its way: Chris Hemsworth in Talks to Star in ‘Transformers’ and ‘G.I. Joe’ Crossover Movie.