As you all probably know, Spider-Man 3 was released last weekend, and it's regarded to be the most expensive money ever made. Officially, the budget is calculated at $ 250 million, but insider sources claim that the budget was probably somewhere closer to $ 300 million, or even higher. An insane amount of money to spend on a movie, especially since, in my opinion, all of that money just doesn't show on the screen. Sure, it has it's spectacular scenes, but nothing we haven't seen before, making you start to wonder where all of that money went. Honestly, I don't think it was spent on making the script as good as it could be, since Spider-Man 3 is regarded as the worst movie in the trilogy, as it seems to be more an effort to cram as many characters in the movie in the hope that something sticks, than a real effort to tell as good a story as possible. This made me think: isn't it time Hollywood started spending less money on their movies, and that it starts to concentrate more on the things that really matter when it comes to a good movie: telling a story that entertains your viewers? Here are five reasons why Hollywood should keep their hands on their wallets in the future.
1. If a movie's budget is big enough to accomodate it, producers will keep demanding stuff to be added, just because audiences "want it"
Look at Spider-Man 3. If it had been up to director Sam Raimi, the movie would have focussed on just two villains: Peter's old friend turned nemesis Harry Osborne and new villain The Sandman. But, on the insistance of producer Avi Arad, a third villain, Venom, was added. Arad realized that Venom is popular with fans, and since there was still enough money in the budget to facilitate it, Venom was added. The result is that now there were three villains, all fighting for attention, with the result that, due to time constraints, neither of them really gets the attention they deserve. The Sandman story starts interestingly enough, giving him a dramatic back story that makes you realize that maybe this is a villain who isn't such a bad guy after all. But since Venom was added, Raimi just didn't have the time to develop the Sandman's story, meaning that he more or less loses his human face towards the end of the movie, and when he regains, the viewers don't really care anymore. And since Venom was added at such a late time in production, his part in this movie seems more an afterthought, with many fans of the character complaining that their favorite was handled badly, instead of being happy that he was in the movie. They should have just put Venom in the fourth movie, on his own, and let Sandman have his own movie, like Dr. Octopus and The Green Goblin in the first two movies. The budget could have been lower, the running time would have been mercifully shorter and the movies would have had more time to tell their story, instead of limping from one set piece to another.
2. With all that money, movie makers get lazy
When you have all the money in the world to make your movie, why would you bother trying to come up with original ways to do things. You can just give the digital animators a big bag of money and they can make anything for you that you would like, so that you don't have to worry your head about actually being creative (no offense to all the very creative digital animators of course).
3. Screenplays wouldn't be endlessly messed with
This is a frustrating one: Movies like Fantastic Four aren't written by screenwriters, they are written by whole teams of screenwriters, who all work independently from each other, trying to correct mistakes in their colleagues versions, even though it's only the producers of a certain movie who see any problems at all. It's easy, you let some guy write a first draft, and if you don't like what you see, why would you go into a discussion with this guy and try to fix things? Instead, just pay the guy and then hire some other guy and tell him that you want him to change the original screenplay, since it's not exactly what the marketing department had in mind when they started coming up with their ways to market the movie. Hey, there's more than enough money for all these different screenwriters anyway, right?
4. Popcorn blockbusters are great, but we would like to see a cool independent movie at our local cinema every now and then as well if you don't mind
I love a good blockbuster as much as the next guy, but sometimes you want something else than high concept flicks that seem to be thought up by a movie studio's marketing department, and not by people who actually have an idea how to make a good movie. I love my local cinema, but pictures like Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen and Brick never played here. I would have to go to Amsterdam for those, where I would then have to try and find them in one of the smaller independent movie theaters.
5. If budgets were lower, there wouldn't be money to hire the same big name stars over and over again, and fresher faces would get a shot
Sure, we all love people like Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Julia Roberts, but there are so many other great actors and actresses out there who deserve a shot at a big part in a big movie. Besides which, nobody deserves $ 35 million for a few months of work. You could make a ton of great independent movies just with the salary of some of today's stars. And do we really want to read in the newspapers that movie star X makes $ 35 million to make a certain movie, and then uses that money to buy big mansions and expensive cars, to then snort the rest up through their nose?
Also, we would have fewer movie projects that sound like they were dreamed up by a team of accountants, like movie versions of 60's tv shows or endless remakes of a successful movie.
Posted by: Harry L | May 14, 2007 at 06:25 PM