Tropic Thunder is certainly making its mark at the box office, but those biggish-budget films with all those actor paychecks make for risky cost-return ratios. As movie studios have long known, and let’s face it, we all know it, making movies with shoestring budgets that are designed to suck in only the stupidest viewers is how you make money safely.
The fact is, the movie business is a business, and in any business you have to produce that which will be consumed in the greatest quantity. The largest demographic available (once you bypass “air-breathers”) is stupid people, and at the end of the day stupid people fund the studios. We all know it. There’s nothing new going on there.
What may be surprising is that generally I’m not only okay with this, I embrace and encourage it. The studios aren’t trying to trick anyone. The jiggly posters get put up, and the screeners with a lot of explosions and bikinis (but no mention of plot) roll, and everyone knows what they’re getting from the word go. A few viewers may complain once in a while, but they were only deluding themselves about their demographic status in any case.
It just doesn’t qualify as any sort of fraud. If you market an iPhone app for $1,000 and state flat out that it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t become fraud just because someone actually buys it.
But, Paramount has recently gone too far, even for me. It’s one thing when a studio says--
“Look, we’re a big movie studio, and we’d like to make some worthwhile films, but not many people actually go to those, so a lot of what we put out is going to have to be for the stupid people who will go see Norbit… again.”
It's also something when a studio has so little to say about itself, and wants so desperately to embrace the really easily amused that one of the best things it has to say about itself is, "Come Look At Our Facebook Page!"
But, It’s quite another thing when one of those studios creates a specific arm of their moviemaking juggernaut devoted only to making absolute garbage, and moreover sequels, prequels, and otherwise spinoffs of things that were garbage in the first place.
Paramount recently announced the creation of Paramount Famous Productions which will turn out something like five to six movies per year, with initial releases set to begin in early 2009. This branch of Paramount will be devoted exclusively to rehashings and/or further exploitation of previously released films. Already in the can is Without a Paddle: Nature’s Calling, some manner of further exposition on the wonder of cinema that was Without a Paddle. Quickly to follow will be such masterworks as new spins on Grease, Road Trip, The Naked Gun, and Mean Girls. I’ll even give you Mean Girls as a decent enough flick, but I shudder to think what result will find itself on the DVD-direct shelves when a specifically-craptastic-nonsense-sequel production studio gets through with it.
You want to hope this is going to fail, but you have to admit you also want to pick up some Paramount stock. Time will tell how things will pan out, but can we draw a damn line somewhere?
Be sure to check out my recent review of Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix here.
Are You Screening?
© 2008, Are You Screening?. All rights reserved. Reprinting without express permission of the author is prohibited.
About Marc Eastman
Marc Eastman is the owner and operator of Are You Screening? and has been writing film reviews for over a decade, and several branches of the internet's film review world have seen his name. His reviews have brought him personal praise from the director of a major motion picture, and have been used as required reading in a course at a major University. These priceless rewards, along with just bags of cash, keep him from straying from freelance writing. He is also a member of The Broadcast Film Critics Association and The Broadcast Television Journalists Association.
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