This talking about movies has put me in mind of a magazine article I read recently. In this article, a man was proposing a new movie rating system which, unlike Hollywood's current system, doesn't assume that morality is just for kids. This new rating system will take into account whether a movie meets a certain moral standard, then will give an appropriate age range for the movie. His own production company would be making movies that meet the code, yet still be entertaining. The article went into quite a bit of detail, but came to the conclusion that if Hollywood sees moral movies making money, it will start making more of them.
Somehow I doubt it.
Family friendly movies have grossed more money than any other types of movies, but does Hollywood care about that? No. Just look at the Oscar nominees for best picture this year. Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night and Good Luck (had to get McCarthyism in there somehow), Crash, and Munich. They all pretty much bombed at the box office. In fact, none of those 5 movies even made it into the top 40 highest grossing films of 2005.
The top moneymaking film of 2005 was Star Wars III--Revenge of the Sith. Did it receive any Oscar nominations? Not that I've heard. Of course, I don't pay all that much attention to the Oscars anymore anyway, given the fiasco that it's become. The five Best Picture nominees put together only grossed about half of what Star Wars did.
The top 15 money making movies of 2005 are:
- Star Wars: Episode III--Revenge of the Sith
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
War of the Worlds
King Kong
Wedding Crashers
Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory
Batman Begins
Madagascar
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
Hitch
The Longest Yard
Fantastic Four
Chicken Little
Robots
(A Question of Taste, by Andrew Coffin, World Magazine, Vol. 21, Number 7, Issue date Feb 18, 2006)
Only one of those movies is rated R. Yet only one of those movies, that I know of, received any Oscar nominations at all. That was The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It received some technical category nominations, but I don't know if it won any. That was a good movie, too.
Around here, "Planet Hollywood" refers to more than just a restaurant.
4 comments:
Not entirely accurate. Brokeback Mountain actually did extremely well. It's a small budget film, from a small house, without a tremendous marketing budget - yet it made back about 400%, which is a pretty good return of investment. Pretty much all of the top grossing films were also big budget projects, and had to make a ton of money before they even broke even.
Gross revenue isn't the entire story.
But net profit is not an indicator of the popularity of a movie. That is why movie popularity is based on GROSS earnings at the box office rather than net profit. It is a more reliable incidator of how many people actually went and saw the movie.
This is true - but net profit is the indicator of return on investment, I.e. the number the movie producer is most interested in. The most popular movie in the world isn't going to have a sequel if it turned little by way of net profits. Which explains why so many truly awful low-budget horror movies end up with multiple sequels.
YES!! You at least need to see Narnia. It is by far the best movie of that year--in my opinion. I've only seen one other on that list, and that one is Star Wars III.
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