If You’re Going to Destroy a Story …
With only two weeks to go before the start of September, the majority of this year’s big-budget movies have already made their way to, and from, the theatres. Quite a few movies gave us incredibly high expectations and, unfortunately, only one or two of these shows managed to keep people interested past the first hour. It seems that for the better part of a decade movie-goers have had fewer reasons to dig deep into their pockets to pay the hefty prices for the luxury of sitting in uncomfortable, non-reclining chairs and traversing the oddly sticky floors found in movie theatres around the world.
Because many of these films have left much to be desired, we’ve had fewer reasons to justify spending over $30 on a semi-enjoyable DVD ($50 if you’re in Japan), and it’s becoming painfully obvious that the era of originality is long gone as every movie seems to be a remake of a remake, and an exceptionally poor one at that. Movie-goers need something new to keep us interested, and movie companies need something new to bring in the huge revenues they enjoyed in the latter part of the 20th century. But how can they do this?
Remakes, Re-Tellings, and R-Kelly’s
Over the last few years we’ve seen a number of big-budget remakes. Batman, Superman, Charlie’s Angels, Indiana Jones, Hulk, Daredevil, Spiderman, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Star Trek, Transformers, the Bourne trilogy … the list goes on. Of the movies in this list, none were watchable with the exception of the excellent Bourne movies. In every case, the movies made after 2001 were almost a complete re-write of the original stories where only the character names were left intact. These radical story changes were unwelcome by almost everyone who had enjoyed the orginal stories. In some cases, movie fans were R. Kelly’d with explanations involving alternate timelines, in other cases there was no justifyable excuse for the complete story re-write.
But this wasn’t going to stop anyone from paying the ridiculous ticket prices to see these computer-enhanced films with bastardized story lines. No-sir-ee. Instead many of us went to the theatres knowing that the movie was going to require that we leave our cognitive functions at the door and sit back to ooh and ahh the increasingly realistic computerized explosions and impossibly massive scales of enemy machinations. The hideously incomplete plot lines, redundant one-liners, and completely pointless sex scenes were just “bonus” features.
Enter the Competition
The chances of movie studios movie away from the highly lucrative existing franchise story re-writings is slim and none, so we’ll probably see an increasing number of underwhelming stories released in the next few years until the video game industry perfects their interactive movie technologies. So, to pass the time until such a day actually arrives, I have a suggestion to the big movie studios to help them boost (apparently) sluggish movie attendance and low DVD/Blu-Ray sales: a profits competition.
The premise would be incredibly simple. A single story is selected to be made into a mega-blockbuster, and several production crews work in separate teams to out-do the other. The finished movies will all be released the same month, and customers who attend the movie will have a website address on the ticket as well as a unique id number that will give them the opportunity to say whether the movie was good, okay, or complete blah. Of course, people who have seen one movie can watch the other movies at a discounted rate, giving them the opportunity to see the different versions which will undoubtedly all have different plot twists and enough differences to not bore the audience. Once all the votes are tallied, the movie with the highest number of positive votes will win all the profits to the three movies. The other movies will only have their production costs covered.
Of course there would need to be certain monetary caps put in place. Actors, directors, and everyone else with big contracts would only be paid a base, with bonuses dependant on the results of the audience surveys. There are undoubtedly a few other areas that I don’t know about which would need to be complicated by contracts and whatnot, but this could usher in a new kind of movie-going experience. No longer would we feel powerless to voice our complaints against a bunch of multi-millionaire entertainment-types who delivered a shoddy product!
But would this work?
That’s the question, isn’t it? Would people be willing to watch two, three, or four movies with the same characters and (heavily modified) base script and give their opinions online afterwards? It would be a nice revenue stream for the big movie companies if it did work, though. Not only could they sell the “winning” DVD later, but they could make bundles with the losers raking in a passive income as well.
Alas, this will probably never come to pass. Why do something that could excite the consumer when it’s more profitable to sue them for stealing the current not-so-creative works online? I’m not being unreasonable with my expectation to receive a quality and mostly creative product for my hard-earned money, am I?
Do you think current movies are still worth today’s admission price? Would a competition for profits improve the quality of “blockbuster” films? I’d love to know your thoughts.