Call me a movie elitist, but I’ve never understood the press and public obsession with Hollywood box-office figures and production budgets.
For the past few days, everywhere you turn there are stories about the “record-breaking” grosses scored by “The Dark Knight” last weekend.
Warner Bros.did smash a three-day record set by “Spider-Man 3” last year, selling close to $160 million worth of tickets for the Batman sequel.
Those are impressive numbers for the rather tepid summer of 2008 — in three days, “The Dark Knight” earned almost as much as it’s taken “Sex & the City” to make in more than a month.
But why should I care what a movie grosses or what it cost to produce?
Warren Beatty once said a very wise thing when someone complained to him about the runaway costs associated with his notorious flop, “Ishtar” — i.e. that the ticket price is the same for a $100 million movie as it is for a $1 million indie.
Before the multiplex boom of the 1980s, films opened slowly around the country, filtering out from exclusive first-run engagements in urban centers to the second-run theaters in outlying territories. This process was spread out over several months, so it took quite a while for studios to gauge how much money a movie might earn. Because they had a much longer theatrical shelf life, movies had the time to pick up steam from good word of mouth — that’s how “Bonnie & Clyde” slowly became a sizeable hit in late 1967 and early 1968 after a very disappointing first-run debut.
When I came of age as a moviegoer in the ’60s and ’70s, me and my friends never had the foggiest notion of what the movies we loved were grossing on a week by week basis because that information wasn’t considered “news” outside of trade papers like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
We never knew that “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) was only a modest earner or that “Petulia” (1968) was a financial flop — movie buffs in those days focused on what was up on the screen, not the money that was flowing into a studio’s coffers.
If you had gone up to someone interested in movies in the summer of 1974 and mentioned that “The Parallax View” had lost a bundle for Paramount you would have gotten a blank stare.
