NJ Star Ledger: Does Bad Buzz and a ballooning budget spell doom for a movie?
By Stephen Whitty/The Star-Ledger
The mighty have fallen.
Oprah Winfrey’s cable network is staggering, searching for audiences. Steven Spielberg’s last three projects — “War Horse,” “The Adventures of Tintin” and the TV show “Terra Nova” — all failed to find real respect, or many American fans.
But show business’ biggest bad news came out of Disney, which recently announced it was taking a $200 million writedown after the collapse of its epic sci-fi adventure “John Carter” — giving the film the dubious honor of becoming the biggest money-loser in movie history.
And Willem Dafoe — who played the alien Tars Tarkas — has his own theory for the disaster.
“I definitely think all this negativity about the budget hurt it,” he says, referring to endless internet gossip about the cost of the film. “And I don’t get the outrage. … Nothing was inflated. It’s all up there on the screen. The technology is just very, very costly.”
Whether the criticism was justified or not, long before anyone saw “John Carter,” people were talking about how expensive it was, how long it was taking to shoot, how much was being spent on re-shoots. And that kind of attention can be a problem.
“When the story becomes the budget instead of the movie, it puts a negative connotation on everything,” says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com’s box-office division. “We saw that with ‘Evan Almighty,’ where it became, ‘They’re spending $170 million on a comedy sequel? And it doesn’t even have the original star?’? ”
You would think it wouldn’t matter to audiences, who pay the same for their tickets no matter how much a movie costs.
“I definitely think all this negativity about the budget hurt it,” he says, referring to endless internet gossip about the cost of the film. “And I don’t get the outrage. … Nothing was inflated. It’s all up there on the screen. The technology is just very, very costly.”
Whether the criticism was justified or not, long before anyone saw “John Carter,” people were talking about how expensive it was, how long it was taking to shoot, how much was being spent on re-shoots. And that kind of attention can be a problem.
“When the story becomes the budget instead of the movie, it puts a negative connotation on everything,” says Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com’s box-office division. “We saw that with ‘Evan Almighty,’ where it became, ‘They’re spending $170 million on a comedy sequel? And it doesn’t even have the original star?’? ”
You would think it wouldn’t matter to audiences, who pay the same for their tickets no matter how much a movie costs.
After all, if audiences really cared about price tags, they’d reward pictures that came in under budget — a theory that the thrifty Clint Eastwood can tell you is not the case. He’s famous for being a fast, economical filmmaker — and seven of his last 10 films have flopped with fans.
And it hardly explains James Cameron, who’s never met a budget he didn’t bust. Yet even as his risks have grown increasingly extravagant — “Terminator 2,” “Titanic,” “Avatar” — so have the studio’s returns. Cameron doesn’t just make films, he makes events, in which the cost practically becomes a selling point.
One thought on “NJ Star Ledger: Does Bad Buzz and a ballooning budget spell doom for a movie?”
Very interesting. And it’s nice to see some love for “Strange Days”, it’s a great movie.