Comments on: Hollywood’s Disconnect

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:43:15 +0000

yeah, I think gaming is far more creative than movies these days.

One last point on Eastwood, I really preferred Letters over Flags. While both were interesting as a sort of “bookends” on Iwo Jima, Letters was a beautifully done movie that humanized Japanese soldiers without covering up their brutality. Tora Tora Tora is the only other mainstream theatre movie I am aware of that includes the Japanese POV.

There’s a really interesting movie titled Tae Guk Gi that you should look into as well.

Das Boot was a similar experience, albeit from the German perspective.

By: Leland Rucker

Leland Rucker — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:33:25 +0000

Good point about Eastwood’s films, Jeff — guess I could have looked those numbers up, huh? The thing that really fascinates me about gaming/movies is that gaming is a much larger business, yet movies still seem to be considered somehow more important by media and online sources. I think the real problem in Hollywood is a complete lack of original source material, which means that it relies on films mostly based around books, nostalgic tv shows, theme-park rides, sequels and popular video games.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:38:33 +0000

Leland,
I am suggesting that Hollywood studio chiefs, producers, and influence peddlers are generally all within the same echo chamber and have disconnected from what American audiences want to pay $10 a ticket to go and see.

It’s not about appealing to the lowest common denominator either, I believe it’s as simple as not being hostile to the American audience as whole.

Flags of our Fathers did $62m gross in theatres and another $44m in DVD sales, which for a movie with a budget of $50m is a hell of lot better than any of the current generation of Iraq movies will do, probably as an entire group. Letters From Iwo Jima, a film with most of the dialog as subtitles, did even better. It’s theatre gross was $68m and DVD’s did another $15m, but that movie was made for a meager $13m budget. On balance, I think you are incorrect on the facts to suggest that Eastwood didn’t do well with these movies.

Interestingly, Call of Duty has until the Modern Warfare title been entirely set in WWII and it’s surely broken over $1 billion in sales to date, suggesting that there is some correlation between what sells at the theatre and on the game console.

By: Leland Rucker

Leland Rucker — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:24:36 +0000

Hey Jeff, are you suggesting that Hollywood, which is made up of different studios run by different people (not all flaming liberals, btw) decided as a group to come out with anti-American war movies to educate the public? Oh, were it that simple. And if we follow your suggestions, all Hollywood would put out would be movies of video games (hey, it didn’t do badly with Disney World rides). But appealing to the lowest common denominator won’t solve anything. Clint Eastwood’s recent patriotic WWII movies didn’t do that well, either.

By: Rod St. Halpin

Rod St. Halpin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:01:31 +0000

One can only hope that the efforts of Hollywood celebrities to influence the 2008 election will prove as negligible as they did in 2004.

Maybe the public is smarter than they think. When it comes to important political, social or economic issues of the day, perhaps most of the public realizes that the opinions of rich, sheltered and vapid “Hollywood elites” are simply irrelevant.

“Ahead of its time” my *ss.