Box office behemoths and indie darlings

For those interested in the way the financial/production end of the the moviemaking business affects the creative output, The Wall Street Journal’s Sundance coverage yesterday included a useful article on how and why the major studios are trending toward smaller-budget, more adult films. It’s subscription only, but here’s the relevant passage:

Gay cowboys are hot, big apes are not and Hollywood is looking for answers. The most successful films of last year were either super-expensive events like "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe," which cost $150 million to make, or low-budget breakouts like "Brokeback Mountain," which cost $13 million. The conventional mid-range studio film, with a production budget of anywhere from $30 million to $100 million, is in the riskiest zone. Next week, lower-budget films, not pricey blockbusters, are expected to dominate the Academy Award nominations.

With film revenues falling and audience tastes shifting, the clamor for small movies that might have big box-office potential is on the rise. Some of the least-expensive studio offerings of last year managed to make multiple times their cost at the domestic box office. "Walk the Line," the Johnny Cash biopic released by News Corp.'s Fox 2000 label, cost $28 million to make and took in more than $100 million. "March of the Penguins," a nature documentary that was bought for just $1 million at last year's Sundance festival, became a summer family favorite and brought in nearly $80 million for Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Independent Pictures.

The result is the competition for small movies that can break out has become as interesting as the big-budget battles waged by the major studios, putting festivals like Sundance in an ever-brighter spotlight.

Despite Chris Orr’s lament about the dearth of watchable B+ films earlier this week, I think that this move toward the filmmaking scales—smaller on one end and massive on the other—is almost entirely good news. On one hand, we’ll still get those gargantuan, megabudget spectacles—gluttonous celluloid fireworks displays that impress through size and showiness by visualizing the most fantastic, impossible images anyone can imagine. Despite all the caviling about the Big Bad Blockbuster and how it destroyed New Hollywood, blah blah blah, I think we need these. No other medium is so suited to delivering grandiose, imagistic thrills, and it’d be a shame to remove our ability to see what visionaries like Spielberg and Jackson can do with a $200 million CGI paint set.

But on the other hand, it looks as if we’ll see far more of the quirky, uniquely drawn character dramas and other films that aren’t quite so rooted in Hollywood formulas. Whether it’s the comic, surrealist dreamscapes of Charlie Kaufman, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, the sad-sack antics of Alexander Payne’s wine losers or amateur-style experimentations of Steven Soderbergh, the fairly low budget (under $20 million) film world has come to represent an artistic freedom that’s simply not available when you’re spending $50 or $70 million. More of these movies is going to mean more experimentation and more opportunities for adventurous audience types, at least those in the major cities, to see something other than bland rehashes and remakes.

Best of all, I think it might convince more prestige directors to go the Soderbergh route of directing both large scale crowd pleasers and microbudget oddities. Currently, the megadirectors and studio-level auteurs are pretty much forced to find some way to take the traditional hot-chicks-explosions-and-life-lessons model of filmmaking and try to put their stamp on it. But, as Soderbergh said in a recent interview, it’s “difficult to find material that is commercial that doesn’t make you feel bad in the morning.” This trend could mean that “commercial” material is no longer something great directors feel compelled to find.