How Hollywood learned to love the bomb

Why are we so fascinated by flops? Each year, there’s a race in the media to declare one movie or another the biggest disaster of the summer, and these days, the speculation seems to start weeks or months before a film’s release. In some cases, as with World War Z, the result blows past expectations to turn into a “surprise” success; for others, like The Lone Ranger, the early forebodings turn out to have been more than justified. At times, the media’s salivation over an impending bomb verges on the unseemly: the knives were out for R.I.P.D. long before it underwhelmed over this past weekend, to a point where a lot of potential audience members may have been discouraged from attending by the negative press. Nobody likes to back a loser. (It’s also worth noting that the definition of a bomb is more subjective than you might think: Pacific Rim has already made a number of lists of big-budget disasters, but fans on Reddit and elsewhere are equally eager to declare it a success, and the real truth is likely to land somewhere in the middle, especially once international grosses are taken into account.)

I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else: God knows I’ve spent enough time on this blog writing about John Carter. And the media has been obsessed with high-profile flops for as long as we’ve been going to the movies. Still, there’s no denying that the cycle has accelerated in recent years, to an extent that goes hand in hand with our fixation with getting the weekend numbers as quickly as possible. I’ve always been a box office junkie: I’ve visited the sites Box Office Mojo and Box Office Guru twice a week for most of the last fifteen years, and I’ll frequently check the latter’s Twitter feed for the latest updates. For big releases, estimated numbers for opening day are often available online early Saturday morning, which leads to an extraordinarily rapid verdict on the movie’s ultimate prospects: Friday numbers can be used to project the weekend as whole, which can give you a decent sense of the final gross, meaning that a picture that took a studio two or three years to conceive, produce, and market can have its success or failure decided in less than twenty-four hours.

In theory, that’s great drama—greater, in many cases, than what’s visible on the screen. And you’d think it would only get more intense as the major studios continue to place all of their bets on a handful of big tentpole pictures, rather than the traditional slate of small- to medium-sized releases. It’s an article of faith in contemporary Hollywood that it’s better to invest everything in a single movie that costs half a billion dollars to make and distribute rather than to spread the cost over half a dozen smaller films. The risks are enormous, but the returns can be equally great. Until, of course, they aren’t. And the stakes involved mean that even otherwise forgettable factory products can seem like insane acts of hubris. A few decades ago, an epochal flop worthy of a book like Final Cut or The Devil’s Candy—which respectively chronicle the stories behind Heaven’s Gate and The Bonfire of the Vanities—seemed to only appear every five years or so, and now, you could write a book like this every summer.

After a while, though, they all start to blur together. A movie like Heaven’s Gate may be a disaster—and make no mistake, it is, despite the recent attempts to reevaluate it as a neglected masterpiece—but at least it was the product of a particular crazed vision, however misguided it might have been. These days, flops are just part of the cost of doing business, and if there’s a story to be told here, it’s less about any one director’s megalomania than about the bumps in what has turned out to be a surprisingly viable corporate model. The blockbuster mentality can be hard to defend from an artistic perspective, and it leads to a glut of sequels and comic book franchises, but from a financial point of view, it works. Universal may have taken a hit from R.I.P.D., but that’s more than offset by the gains from Fast and Furious 6 and Despicable Me 2. It’s a model designed to absorb big disasters, which are a necessary side effect of an industry that rounds everything to the nearest hundred million. Flops, in short, are no longer interesting even as flops. And that’s the saddest part of all.