Panic at Paramount as MI3 "Crashes"

zoostory said:
And most of all, the studios are in a panic because names (not just Tom Cruise) don't seem to be the big draw they used to be. Something is changing in the movie consumer. Less and less people go to any movie because of a name. Perhaps it's because we see more online previews or are more into story and character than actor right now, taste-wise. Who knows, but it is shaking up things, the model is changing!
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Maybe it's the fear of HD, which will show us how ugly those movie stars really are...:)

Not sure I completely agree that things are changing. And though yes, I want to see better stories and characters out of Hollywood, I still think stars are an important part of movies. I think they are part of what makes movies magical. I think this is a fascinating discussion because there has always been a balance between star-quality and acting. I feel like both are necessary.

I also think the whole mess is a very long-term back-lash against the old studio days, where the studio bosses held an iron grip on everything the studio did, stars, crews, stories, directors, everything. And everyone else was just an employee.

I just started what looks like a good book, called: "The Whole Equation" by David Thompson. I'm only a little into it, but it seems to address exactly this discussion here. He starts out with Towne and the whole Chinatown debacle, which is interesting, because that story leads right to Mission Impossible, the first of which Towne wrote. He uises this as a jumping off point to talk about how we got where we are.
 
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"When I was ten years old, I knew I wanted to make movies, but I knew no one was going to give me that. So I started putting away a dollar every week of my life. If I missed a week, I made it up later, from age 10 on. Now, you're looking at enough to get us started. Two thousand one hundred eighty four dollars."
"But movies cost millions of dollars to make."
"That's after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash, every movie costs two thousand one hundred eighty four dollars.
- Bowfinger

Hehe.. I've worked on a couple 'bombs'.. it aint pretty being around the studio
while the numbers are coming in. It'd be nice if the balance started to shift
to the indies.
 
They are shifting to the indies. But it seems like all the larger studios now have an indy branch handeling all of that. There are films out there that say that they are indies or whatever and they cost $20M to make. That doesn't sound like an indy to me. But maybe it is with today's standards for spending $200M on a film.
 
true, many of the indie of the 90s were absorbed into the machine. My writing partner works at Focus, which used to be Good Machine. Focus is the indy arm of Universal. But what's funny is even Focus has now created a B-movie unit called Rogue Pictures to do junk like Seed of Chucky, to pay the bills.
 
I remember being at a theatre where a Focus production was playing and their logo came up and it was out-of-focus. It was pretty funny untill I realised that the whole movie was starting to play out of focus as well due to a stupid projectionist.
 
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