• Home
  • About
    • diacritical
    • Douglas McLennan
    • Contact
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

diacritical

Douglas McLennan's blog

What Happens When Critical Opinion Separates From The Audience?

August 28, 2016 by Douglas McLennan 2 Comments

UChicago_pole_vaultThree stories this week get to the heart of the question. First, the BBC polled critics worldwide and asked them what were the best 100 movies made so far in the 21st Century. Look at the list and you see something striking – the top 10 films collectively took in $213 million, or, as Barry Hertz observed in The Globe & Mail, about $50 million less than Suicide Squad made in two and a half weeks this summer. Of course, you say, mass-appeal blockbustery entertainment is supposed to find bigger audiences than art. But blockbusters can’t be art? A list of best movies of the 20th Century shows much closer convergence between box office and critical opinion.

Hollywood’s artistic model is based on making money. In recent years that model has cleaved in two. At the top end “critic-proof” story franchises like The Avengers, Spiderman, and Hunger Games rule, making hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide. The bets on success are big but the possible returns so huge, these are gambles that have been worth making. Low-investment tiny-budget art films still bump along, their investments small enough that box office failures are survivable. It has been widely observed that the middle has fallen out of the model – that is, mid-budget movies that aren’t reasonably sure of making back their money are too much of a risk and are no longer being made.

This summer, though, even the blockbusters seem to be failing to find audiences.

These movies didn’t just fail; they almost seemed to never exist in the first place, having been dismissed or disposed of almost immediately upon impact. And even if they did do OK for a weekend or two, they never reached beyond their predictable (and increasingly stratified) core audiences. Instead, they were dumbo-dropped into our ever-expanding cauldron of content, where they played to their bases, while everyone else turned to the newest video game, or the latest Drake video, or some random “Damn, Daniel” parody.

At the high end of the model, Hollywood’s sure-thing audiences have started fading. So-called core audiences are no longer sufficient to propel an expensive movie’s success and critics that no longer matter also no longer seem to care. There was a time not so long ago when movie critical and popular taste were more closely aligned. Now movie criticism looks a lot more like criticism in other arts, often with chasms between popular and critical taste.

So is the gap between critics and audience just a sign that movies have matured as an art form and that critical taste of those who are really paying attention inevitably diverges from mass taste? Or is it something different?

Two possibly unrelated observations:

  1. I was watching synchronized diving during the Olympics, getting increasingly irritated at the TV commentators who repeatedly pointed out how this heel or that toe was turned slightly wrong. These egregious faults evidently made a huge difference between whether a dive was a success or not. After a bit I turned the sound off, not just unconvinced but thoroughly annoyed at a grading system that seemed beside the point. A bit later I changed the channel, because, of course, one dive looked pretty much like another.Watching pole vaulting, however, was unexpectedly captivating. Suspense, anticipation and then… no question whether the athlete had made a successful jump or not. Thrilling. Of course I don’t know a thing about either of these sports, they’re all top athletes, and I’m unsophisticated. But unless critical judgment is aligned with values an audience understands, the critical judgment is meaningless to that audience and critics lose their value. So how well do critics make their case not just for or against a work but also for the importance of the values they’re judging by?
  2. Instead of a quality problem maybe Hollywood studios have a scale problem. Perhaps the scale of what’s possible has outstripped the scale of what’s desirable or optimal, and just because one era supported movies that cost $200 million doesn’t mean that another era will. Today’s high-end movies work if they’re critic-proof and there’s already a built-in audience. At the low-budget end, films are successful only if critics embrace them. These are movies without big marketing budgets or wide distribution and they have to depend on critical buzz to find an audience. Not that they’ll ever earn on the scale of the blockbusters, as demonstrated by the BBC list. But there is enough of a reasonable expectation of return that these movies are still being made.

    So what determines the scale of a movie? No one is making a picture that costs $1 billion. That makes no sense, even by blockbuster standards. Blockbusters are not, by definition, bad movies; they are calculations of a potential market set against the cost of appealing to that market. Low-budget films are not, by definition, good movies; they are a calculation of a potential market set against the (significantly lower) cost of appealing to that market. Whether either succeeds depends on how well the market calculations were made. And artistic quality? One counts on critics having no power. The other counts on critics being able to convince. But the growing gap between popular and critical successes is becoming an increasingly bigger problem, not just for the art of making good movies, but for a business that seems to have severed the connection between quality – however that is defined – and judgments of that quality.

Image: Wikimedia

Share:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: audience, audience experience, culture business models

Comments

  1. Cecilia Wong says

    August 29, 2016 at 9:35 am

    “Low-budget films are not, by definition, good movies; they are a calculation of a potential market set against the (significantly lower) cost of appealing to that market.”

    I am afraid you are discounting the passion and vision of the creator; a passion that might be tapping into the collective unconscious of the audience.

    Reply
    • Douglas McLennan says

      August 29, 2016 at 10:05 am

      Cecilia: Of course. Absolutely. Passion and vision are essential. I was referring to the business side and how the movie industry determines what movies to make or not. There are so many good ideas and passionate people, but that doesn’t mean their movies get made.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Douglas McLennan

I’m the founder and editor of ArtsJournal, which was founded in September 1999 and aggregates arts and culture news from all over the internet. The site is also home to some 60 arts bloggers. I’m a … [Read More...]

About diacritical

Our culture is undergoing profound changes. Our expectations for what culture can (or should) do for us are changing. Relationships between those who make and distribute culture and those who consume it are changing. And our definitions of what artists are, how they work, and how we access them and their work are changing. So... [Read more]

Subscribe to Diacritical by Email

Receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 3,846 other subscribers

Follow Us on FacebookFollow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@AJDoug

Tweets by @AJDoug

Recent Comments

  • Margy Waller on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “THIS x — I’ve been wanting this so much. We need a think tank — or a think tank with…” Sep 10, 12:28
  • Franklin on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “William, Ahem, so where’s our Dutch Golden Age? We’re to take such narrowly viewed and decontextualized anomalies as a norm?…” Sep 2, 07:52
  • william osborne on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Ahem, so where’s our Dutch Golden Age? We’re to take such narrowly viewed and decontextualized anomalies as a norm? It’s…” Sep 1, 06:13
  • Franklin on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “I agree with Douglas that public arts funding is too politically fraught in the United States to grow it to…” Aug 31, 11:55
  • william osborne on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “About “static models.” Private funding systems are sometimes promoted exactly because they are thought to be more flexible than public…” Aug 30, 15:56
  • william osborne on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Douglas comments that our current private funding model “no longer works as it was intended, so we need to rethink.”…” Aug 30, 15:18
  • Douglas McLennan on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Franklin – thanks for this. Very useful. A few things – your example of the movies – the creative side…” Aug 30, 12:28
  • Douglas McLennan on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Earl: This is a whole different topic of course, but one I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I…” Aug 30, 08:41
  • Franklin on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Sorry, “in conjunction with one another” in the first paragraph, and not really influence peddling in the last one, but…” Aug 30, 04:25
  • Earl G. Blackburn on Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea: “Douglas, I can’t thank you enough for this post. I’ve been working on a new model of executing management for…” Aug 29, 21:46

Top Posts

  • We Asked: What's the Biggest Challenge Facing the Arts?
  • When Libraries Realize That The Most Valuable Thing They Own Isn't Their Collections
  • "Art Is Good?" Not Much Of An Argument For Art Is It?
  • How a Beethoven Tweet Broke Our Twitter Feed (And Other Lessons About Social Media Today)
  • Do Artists Have A Vision For The Future?

Recent Posts

  • Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea August 23, 2020
  • Five Things to Fix in the Arts August 9, 2020
  • How Technology is Shaping Opera May 18, 2020
  • Parlez-Vous Screen? (online arts and other considerations) May 1, 2020
  • Arts: Rebuild What? And Why? April 30, 2020
August 2016
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Jul   Sep »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Five Things: #1. Business Models and a $9 Billion Idea
  • Five Things to Fix in the Arts
  • How Technology is Shaping Opera
  • Parlez-Vous Screen? (online arts and other considerations)
  • Arts: Rebuild What? And Why?

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.