The Death of the Hollywood Star System, Part 5,297…

Tom Cruise for MI:4 — Huge salary still, but no first dollar gross.

Note that although Cruise is at a career low point, this is for his most popular franchise. If this tanks, it will be a real torpedo to what remains of the Hollywood Star System. If it is profitable…it just drags things out.

First the Studio System…then the Star System..what’s the next paradigm for the film industry, I wonder?  Remember, audience fragmentation is the key factor.

  • BeckoningChasm

    I would say the next big loss would be theatrical showings themselves. Films will go directly to Netflix or YouTube or some such.

    A good theatrical experience is the best way to see a film. But “good theatrical experiences” are getting harder to find.

  • Terrahawk

    I don’t think Hollywood can survive unless the audience defragments. Otherwise, Hollywood will be come somewhat of a clone of Bollywood. Instead of turning out streams of goofy musicals, it will be streams of inane CGI action fests. It’s already here to some extent with films like Avatar, Transformers, and GI Joe. I would say we’re already well into the Technology System. I don’t think it can last long but that’s where we are.

  • P Stroud

    But is it the star system or is it just that so many movies suck? I’ve seldom seen anything come from the studios in the last few years that isn’t derivative. Recycled plots and “updated” remakes. The Script-O-Matic rules the roost these daze.

  • fish eye no miko

    @BeckoningChasm: Yeah, I wonder… it’s already getting to the point where there’s often a 6 month-or-less turn around from theatrical release to home video release, even for movies that did ok (and if they poorly, it’s even greater; for example, 9, which came out theatrically in September, was released on video in December). It’ll be interesting to see when Avatar is released on DVD/Blu-Ray.

  • BeckoningChasm

    @fish eye–I see that Sherlock Holmes, which did GREAT business, is due out in mid-March. So even the big films are getting shorter and shorter windows.

  • Ericb

    I’m no expert on the industry but part of the problem is that these days the major studios are dominated by boardrooms rather than individual entrepreneurs so the product they churn out exhibits the risk-averse medocrity you get when cautious group-think takes over. It’s like trying not to lose rather than actually trying to win. It’ll kill them on the long run.

  • cavalier

    We seem in an era of forgettable movies. The DVD comes out after the initial interest fades but before it’s forgotten. Kind of a short-term nostalgia.

    It also means the studio only has to seriously track something for less than a year from release. These are not, and not intended to be, classics with long-term appeal. That takes too much effort. Just make sure next year’s revenues are good.

  • i’m going to argue that boardrooms controlled the studios back in the day as well. I think it was Sam Warner who thought that Romeo & Juliet would have done better if the main characters had survived.

    But I have no love for Hollywood and no particular desire to see it survive. It’s not like if Hollywood were erased from the face of the Earth by an angry God it would stop movies from being made. We’ll stil have movies, and many of them will be good. Losing Hollywood, IMO, might actually increase the average quality of films.

  • BeckoningChasm

    Honestly, I think one of the biggest stupidities that is killing Hollywood is a kind of “magical thinking.” You know, if we get actor A and director B, they will make more money than A and B’s previous projects combined! Also, if we release movie C on the same date as last year’s blockbuster, it will be a blockbuster too!

    Ken mentioned previously that the recent Wolfman film’s budget woes came about because they had to meet a release date. I know theaters are booked months if not years in advance, but again that’s just kind of stupid. In addition, you’ve got overtime, bringing in new effects houses, etc. Dumb. Especially for that magical date of February 12th.

  • Rock Baker

    If I were to guess, based on the current flow of events with industiral history as a guide, I would say that the inflated budgets and lame production values will continue to rule until they can no longer sustain profits, ultimatly causing the Hollywood as we know it to collapse. This will lead enterprizing individuals to jump in and fill the void with modestly budgeted films which will generate greater gross on less investment, freer to peddle their own products when the studios have to ease their grip on the theater chains. With smaller, but better crafted films to offer (possibly on a regional basis), they may try to use special promotions -like double features to justify ticket prices or some such. If the public responds to these filmmakers, then what’s left of the studios will hire THEM to produce pictures with larger, but less gigantic than we have now, budgets. The new era of creative and budget concious producers and a renewed interest in craftsmanship could revitalize the industry, but it would only be a matter of time until we have a repeat of the 70’s model of outdoing the other guy with larger and larger but empty spectical that got us where we are today.

  • Rock Baker

    Sorry about the spelling goofs!

  • Mr. Rational

    Believe it or not, I’m actually going to cite one of the most-mocked figures in Jabootu (and my personal) history, Mr. Tom “Billy Jack” Laughlin, in support of Ken. Laughlin’s theory states that the script makes the star, not the other way ’round…and he has tons of anecdotal and box-office evidence to back him up. (Though given his penchant for, shall we say, inventing statistics for his movies, I don’t know how seriously to take that. One of these days, I’ll do further investigating.)

    His idea seems to be that a script should contain certain elements guaranteed to win wide audience favor. Assuming a competent-to-skilled writer, the more of these elements your script contains, the better your script will be. Further, he contends that the people we call “stars” gain that status by playing roles which encourage the development of audience sympathy toward them, and keep the status only as long as they continue to appear in those roles. I’m oversimplifying a bit, but not much. By this theory, the reason the star system is collapsing is because the movies are getting worse.

    Idea for future Mr. Rational project: apply Tom Laughlin’s theory to Tom Laughlin films, and see whether it can explain both the astonishing success and the crash-and-burn that followed.

  • Ericb

    Laughlin’s career demise is easy to explain … as his career progressed the butt kicking declined in exact proportion to the expansion of the political delusions. I haven’t read the review in a while but is there any butt kicking at all in Billy Jack Goes to Washington?

  • BeckoningChasm

    @Mr. Rational: See, I agree with one thing that Laughlin says–stars need to be recognizable. In days of yore, when ancient dinosaurs like myself went to theatres, you KNEW the character that John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, et al played because they chose roles that developed their perceived screen character.

    Nowadays, actors want to prove how versatile they are, so you have a career like Jim Carrey’s–his comedies do well, but he wants to be known as a serious actor, so he makes the occasional serious film (which usually bombs). There’s no way to know what a “Jim Carrey picture” or a “Julie Roberts picture” will be without sitting through the damned things.

    As for Laughlin’s idea that a script should appeal to the widest possible audience, I think that sort of thinking has gotten us the movies we have now–big slabs of visuals with interchangeable dialogue.

  • Ericb

    Well, since the “largest possible audience” these days means an international market the less dialogue the better.

  • Terrahawk

    That leads into what I think another problem with Hollywood is, Globalization. A movie industry is or should be tied to the culture of the country. Let’s face it, Japanese anime, Hong Kong action films, French cinema, Indian musicals, they all have their certain charms. They just aren’t as good when they try to follow the norms of another society. Hollywood used to have an American sensibility. But, I think the quest for increased foreign revenue has killed that and is part of the reason for the decline. GI Joe is a great example of this. What can be more American than GI Joe, yet Hollywood turned it into…. It’s fine if Hollywood sells films oversees, but I think they hurt themselves when they intentionally make them for international audiences.

  • professorKettlewell

    OK. I’m going to stick my neck out here, and say that Hollywood, at its best – ‘Gone with the Wind’ or ‘The Godfather’ or anything – is at it’s best when it’s being ‘ethnic’ cinema – i.e. American cinema made for American audiences. It only goes to hell when it tries to be all things to all people. Throughout the ’80’s and ’90’ and ’00’s, HK, RoK, Japanese and Indian movies gained first cult success then mainstream success precisely because of their ethnocentricity; it’s only when they try to ‘internationalise’ that they blow it.

    To reply to EricB: Ken gave a great answer to your question when he talked about the way that producers are better off making a flop with Tom Cruise than a slightly-profitable effort with reliable character actors: the producer would have been seen to have made all the ‘correct’ decisions and thus be blameless. It’s called ‘quality assurance’, and it’s inherited directly from management theory. Now if you want me to get really boring, I can hold forth for hours on why this is perfectly good practice for a firm of accountants, but absolutely horrible for a creative industry (do you dare me? I can honestly say ‘test-driven strategy development’ with a straight face…..)

    Mr. Rational: Ken also has the answer. The zeitgeist which defined Billy Jack in 1974 had absolutely evaporated by 1977. The fact that mr. Laughlin didn’t stick to his own doctrine is the reason ‘Washington’ crashed and burned. For a Progressive, he didn’t Progess much.

    Rock Baker: I asked Ken a similar question a few months ago, and, since he’s smarter than me, he gave a great answer: what’s going to happen is that stars are going to have to ‘settle’ for earning mere hundreds of thousands of dollars a year instead of tens of millions. Oddly enough, I find it hard to weep for them.

    BeckoningChasm: One of my good friends once made a point about actors wanting to ‘diversify’ that may be a little facetious but I’ll make anyway: you never catch Nobel laureate physicists saying stuff like “oh, but I feel so ghettoised by equilibrium relativistic quantum mechanics…people think that’s all I can do!…I would love to be taken seriously for my complexity-theory protein bioinformatics! I’m not completely one-dimentional!”

    I should stop now.