What Do Hollywood Execs Know?
Another thought on critics: If movie reviewers are such good predictors of financial success, why hasn’t some studio caught on and put a bunch of them on the payroll? It’s not as if the studios aren’t actively pursuing every conceivable formula and strategy to predict what will and won’t work at the box office. As Malcolm Gladwell reported in The New Yorker a few years back, they’re all spending an awful lot of time and money searching for something like a guaranteed success, an answer to the movie industry’s longest standing problem, put famously by William Goldman: Nobody knows anything. If they’re willing to take a look at, say, sketchy predictive software, why not at human evaluators with long, presumably proven track records? It’s not as if movie critics are a particularly expensive bunch of people to pick up, certainly not by studio standards. If Lundegaard is right, then shouldn’t studios have an interest in this?
Of course, I suspect Lundegaard isn’t really right, and that even if there’s some truth to his argument, focus groups are probably more accurate predictors of success than any critical aggregate — making critics less valuable, from a pure box office standpoint, than a bunch of random strangers culled from an LA grocery store.
You’ve really reached epic levels of concern trolling on this subject.
— Freddie · Jul 6, 06:59 PM · #
Two posts is epic? Geeze, the internet really has destroyed our attention spans. Wall-E: More right that we knew!
— Peter Suderman · Jul 6, 08:42 PM · #
Two thoughts on movies, though both tangential (sorry).
Firstly: I come to TAS for conventional-wisdom defying, daring commentary on American culture. It is therefore reasonable that someone over there should accept the challenge of having something credible yet positive to say about Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which looks to me to be an abomination. The gauntlet is thrown down, suckas. Be the critic who saves this movie.
Secondly, y’know, I just don’t have the Pixar-love y’all do, though I really enjoyed Wall-E, which we just saw (my about-to-be-5 daughter has been bouncing off the walls with anticipation, but we postponed it because for some reason I can’t explain I became obsessive over make the really quite long long trip to see Wall-E in Rall-E, which in the end we didn’t do). And my kid spent much of the movie with her hands over her eyes, and I wonder if I’m a bad parent for not smuggling her out even though the place was packed. I mean, I just don’t think Pixar does a good job making shows for young kids — they make adult-pleasing shows (Cars is the big exception, and the film adults like least). And they’ve been trending more that way — I mean, Ratatouille just ain’t a kids’ film. And, well, maybe that’s because to some extent it’s not really possible: hell, even kids in different age brackets just want to watch different things.
My sense is that this happens because the culture at Pixar wants to make children’s stuff but is a little kid-clueless. A little over a year ago my daughter (then 3) got to tour the Pixar studios some because we had a friend there. And while she was grooving on the Monsters, Inc. statue and the like, people interacted with her in funny ways while trying to engage — ike the programmer who tried to get her very excited about technologies which created a “chiaroscuro effect.” (Fortunately she can be polite.) So the crew there throws in a “Mo” as their sort of Jar-Jar and figures, OK, we’ve taken care of the preschool demographic.
But of course that kind of “something for everyone” movie isn’t really necessary — it’s not like I feel terrible when I take my kid to a child’s event that’s really mostly unapologetically child-oriented. And I wonder, are we becoming such a shallow society, that you can’t enjoy going somewhere with your kid unless you get stuff there that’s just for you, too? Is Pixar a symptom of that?
— Sanjay · Jul 6, 09:12 PM · #
I’m a bit confused about the idea you’re suggesting. Where are the critics to get involved in the process? Before or after the movie has been made? Even if critics are able to judge good movies after the fact and their judgments correspond to what the public wants to see, that doesn’t mean they can positively influence on a film under development.
Another question arises because of the way that films are made: various scenes are shot separately, and with the exception of the director, few people may have a feel for how the overall movie fits together until it is in a late stage of the game (at which point, what would the studios do to respond to the critic? Just eat the loss?).
— Justin · Jul 6, 09:37 PM · #
If critics have talent, they should make their own movies, the way Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders started out as a music critic and ended up as a rock star.
Jay Cocks, the Time film critic, has written a few screenplays that have gotten made, with some success. Graham Greene was a movie critic who ended up having a lot of his novels made into movies.
— Steve Sailer · Jul 7, 01:33 AM · #
Most people who want to be film critics want to, in one fashion or another, impose their will upon others. They want to explain why they like the movies they like because they identify with those movies, so if they can argue others into understanding and agreeing with their reasons, they can raise the status of their favorite movies, which will in turn raise the status of their own traits that led them to identify with those movies, thus raising their own status!
Of course, it’s a hopelessly Rube Goldbergian way to pursue power and status!
— Steve Sailer · Jul 7, 01:42 AM · #
I think critics (or, perhaps more accurately, the elite scrutiny of which critics are a part) act as a check on the base commercial desires of executives who green light movies. Elites don’t have the power to make exploitative populist movies unprofitable, but they can exercise influence by making the people who put them out lose face. In some sense, this elite constraint is just economic inefficiency, but I think it’s also crucial to a functioning culture. There’s nothing economically wrong with “When Animals Attack: The Movie,” but we do hope for the arts to occasionally try for something more thoughtfully constructed.
— southpaw · Jul 7, 03:34 PM · #
Steve Sailer is apparently not clear on the distinction between analysis and synthesis, nor has he read his Dave Hickey; I don’t see why the talent for forming and articulating a coherent critique necessarily relates in any way to the talent for creating art. The fact that Chrissie Hynde or Ira Kaplan or Neil Tennant may have started as critics, or that Stephin Merritt or David Thomas or John Darnielle can write high-quality criticism when the mood is upon them, simply means that there’s a certain overlap among these distinct talents, and that the people who tend to have that overlap might tend to be of a certain cerebral, empirically-minded personality type. But so what?
— Jesse · Jul 7, 04:57 PM · #
Putting critics on the payroll would be a bad idea, methinks; once this tid-bit was made public, it would undermine their credibility and destroy the dynamic you were depending on.
Better to build advanced psychological profiles of the top twenty or so critics, then construct movies to hit them in all the right spots.
— JA · Jul 7, 05:32 PM · #