I see that Master and Commander has tanked. Not in absolute terms: a $67.5 million gross in the first three weeks of release would be perfectly respectable under normal circumstances. Unfortunately, Master and Commander cost $135 million, stars Russell Crowe, and got hysterically enthusiastic reviews. So why isn’t it doing better? A whole lot better? The answer is to be found in The Wall Street Journal‘s post-Thanksgiving report on this year’s holiday films, which declared with blunt finality that “the adult-skewing audience it is pitched toward hasn’t responded strongly enough.”
That rumble you hear in the middle distance is the sound of doom for big-budget adult movies, which were already sick unto death and have now officially straight-lined. If a film with all the advantages of Master and Commander can’t do any better than $67.5 million after three weeks, don’t expect any remotely similar project to get the green light. Expensive movies, like Trix, are for kids.
Is there still room for smart movies made on the cheap? Absolutely, and plenty of it. But I expect that the adventurous indie flicks of the not-so-distant future will find their audiences not in theatrical release, but via such new-media distribution routes as direct-to-DVD and on-demand digital cable. As I predicted four years ago in “Tolstoy’s Contraption,” an essay published in the Journal and collected in A Terry Teachout Reader,
it is only a matter of time before [independent] films are routinely released directly to videocassette and marketed like books (or made available in downloadable form over the Internet), thus circumventing the current blockbuster-driven system of film distribution. Once that happens, my guess is that the independent movie will replace the novel as the principal vehicle for serious storytelling in the twenty-first century.
I got the technology wrong, but everything else right. Especially now that large-screen TVs are making it easier to watch films at home under more visually advantageous circumstances, I doubt that over-30 moviegoers will continue to subject themselves to the unpleasantries of trips to the local gigaplex. Intimate films like Lost in Translation and The Station Agent gain little or nothing when you view them in a theater, surrounded by cell-phone addicts and other freaks and morons. (Yes, I recently watched Kissing Jessica Stein for the first time, and have now added that invaluable phrase to my personal repertoire.) I’d just as soon see such films in the comfort of my living room, the same way I’d read a good book.
Movies as novels, bought on the Web and consumed at home: that’s the future of grownup filmmaking in America. See if it doesn’t happen, soon.