Globex Corporation Newsletter

I did not go to one movie this summer and while you'd think that'd make me a horrible person to comment on this, I think it makes me the perfect person to comment on the summer movie season. I won't comment on the content of any movie as, like I said, I didn't see any of them, but I will comment on what made the summer crappy movi-wise. In a word: remakes.

Good lord, are there any original ideas in Hollywood? The whole summer was just one remake after another. Every year someone tries to remake something, soometimes it's a good idea, sometimes it's something that no one gave a damn about in the first place. The Dukes of Hazzard? The TV show was a piece of crap, why would I spent 8 bucks to see something I didn't like in the first place? Bewitched? Sorry I just wasn't a big fan.

Then there's the remakes of "classics." I put "classics" in quotations because it's hard to characterize Bad News Bears as a classic, yet it was a fine little movie in the 70's. It was what it was. Bad News Bears 2005 edition had, I would guess, an advertising budget that was greater than the production cost of the original. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was a classic, though, and while I have a huge amount of respect for Tim Burton (I've nearly forgiven him for Planet of the Apes) and Johnny Depp, It's pretty dangerous to fiddle with a movie that is remembered so fondly. Actually, of all of this summer's movies, Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the one I looked forward to most. The original had a very subtle underlying sinister attitude and I was curious to see how Tim Burton would deal with that.

And then of course there were sequels. The final installment of the Star Wars saga was looked forward to by millions of movie goers this summer. Since the first five movies of the franchise averaged out to be above average movies, the anticipation, I think, was warrented. The there was The Transporter 2. There was a Transporter 1? I guess I missed it. Seriously I was aware of The Transporter, I just wasn't aware of legions of hardcore Transporter fans marching on Hollywood and demanding a sequel. So now we're making sequels of movies that nobody cared about the first time around.

And that's my biggest bitch about this summer's movie season, the whining. Hollywood is whining that they aren't making any money. I've heard tons of reasons (literally, I weighed them) for the sagging box office numbers. Not once did I hear anything like,"We ran out of good ideas about 10 years ago and have been churning out crap since then, the public finally caught on." This is a hell of a lot closer to the truth than blaming box office numbers on the economy.

I'm sure there are still good movies coming out of Hollywood and elsewhere, but movie execs have simply been betting on the wrong horses. I understand how difficult it must be to decide what the public is going to want, especially considering the long process of making a movie. I understand that all of the Hollywood movie execs didn't get together a couple of years ago and agree that Summer 2005 would be the Summer of Remakes. They're in competition with each other and occassionally come up with competing ideas (Asteroid vs. Deep Impact or Volcano vs. Dante's Peak) but the movie making process can't be done in complete secret. If an exec hears that competing studios are producting remakes of Dukes of Hazzard, Willy Wonka and the Chocoalate Factory, Bad News Bears, Bewitched, Batman, Fantastic Four, The Longest Yard, and War of the Worlds, why the hell would he green-light yet another?

By the way, Hollywood's "dissapointing" summer at the box office, it was merely the fourth highest grossing summer ever....

BOJ