Word: moneyitis
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...were also the year's most expensive movies, costing between $210 million and $250 million, not including the cost of bringing them to market (usually another $100 million or so). Studio moguls are always looking for ways to tamp down runaway budgets, but they may have to acknowledge that money on the screen equals money in the bank often enough to take the risk. The worldwide popularity of these über-movies also suggests that smaller pictures will have a harder time getting made. That trend is already evident: the industry earned its big boodle in 2009 while making about...
Note that, of the directors of these nine flops, four were either Academy Award winners (Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard) or Oscar nominees (Michael Mann, Spike Jonze), whereas Cameron is the only Oscar winner among directors of the top 10 grossers. The lessons: prestige directors get to spend more money, and, in dollar terms, their "personal vision" can look astigmatic to the mass audience. (And great to critics, who put the Mann and Jonze films on their 10-best lists, and would rightly fret if big-budget assignments went only to hacks.) Consider, too, that none of the first seven...
...down the movie money chain, that rule applies. In medium-budget films, stars and directors with hits in their past can take disastrous oversteps. In 2009, reliable comedy stars such as Adam Sandler and Jack Black headlined fairly pricey pictures (Funny People, Year One) that went doggo; Sacha Baron Cohen tried to parlay his Borat success with the more acerbic Brüno, and what did the audience do? Pranked him. Ferrell's Land of the Lost cost $100 million to produce, and took in less than half that domestically...
...popularity as some triumph of the clones. It's not that the killer-toy action adventure was a bad movie, though it was, but that it amassed its fortune almost by rote, as if its title alone, promising to duplicate the automaton thrills of its predecessor, justified laying down money for it. Transformers 2 didn't enter the national consciousness; it anaesthetized it. Nobody buzzed about the movie, but everybody saw it. The industry, it seemed, had finally figured out a way to mass-produce blockbusters. Pringles pictures on the grand scale...
Gtrot pays homage to the former college (ahem, cheap) student ranks of its creators in a sidebar stating that it "provides revolutionary tools for sharing cabs to the airport and rides to/from campus, saving you money while helping the environment...