The New York Times ran a business news article over the weekend about the latest Hollywood bluckbuster-that-wasn't. This one—a Ryan Gosling action-romance-date-night extravaganza called "The Fall Guy"—opened to a dismal first-week performance, despite seemingly having every chance of success. The film is kicking off the summer blockbuster season, when families typically have more time to see movies. The critics apparently adored it. Yet it flopped.
Now, I have not actually seen the movie (just like the rest of America, it would seem). But I'm willing to take the critics' word for it that it is pretty good. Why, then, does this not translate into box office success? Because quality and the response of the public are two very different things.
I do not mean to imply by this that the public necessarily demands schlock. It looks like this movie has plenty of explosions and car chases—that's not the problem with it. This is no art-house picture that will keep people snoozing in their seats. I simply mean that the public's reaction to films is such a complete black box that no one can possibly hope to predict it in advance. A movie catches on or doesn't based on mysterious ebbs and flows in the collective psyche that no one can foresee.
The Times article makes the same point, and suggests that this is why most Hollywood studios have given up rolling the dice on any major film that does not belong to a recognized franchise. The executives took a chance on The Fall Guy as an original premise because people keep telling them that that's what they want. But then, no one came to see it. So, the studios are likely to default to superhero movies and sequels again. At least this takes some of the uncertainty out of the process.
In his memoir of movie-writing, The Monster, John Gregory Dunne talks about how the incredible instability and unpredictability of the film market has generated a strange sort of community of interest and esprit de corps among would-be competitors. In most businesses, after all, different firms would be rooting for their rivals' products to fail. But in the movie business, Dunne writes, every producer breathes relief every time any film does well—because it proves it is at least possible to succeed in this business.
I don't know the answer to this conundrum, or what movie studios should do about it—the secret of the public's reactions to films is just as much a mystery to me as to anyone else. But I would like to point out that this is at least not a problem unique to film. It has dogged every form of entertainment that caters to a mass audience, going back to the film's major predecessor: the stage production.
In his classic 19th-century book on group psychology, The Crowd, Gustave Le Bon reports the same complaint from stage producers that we hear from movie studios today: namely, that there is simply no accounting for public taste. In one of the footnotes in the book, Le Bon writes: "it sometimes happens that pieces refused by all theatrical managers obtain a prodigious success when by a stroke of chance they are put on the stage." (Unwin trans. throughout)
This is the reverse side of the Fall Guy phenomenon. For every "sure winner" that fails—for every action-packed-critically-acclaimed-romantic-comedy that simply fails to find an audience, despite all the predictions to the contrary, there is a sleeper hit—some low budget independent film shot in a single room that somehow mysteriously captures the heart of the movie-going public. In one direction or the other, therefore, it is simply impossible to predict the public's taste in film.
This is not because, in Le Bon's telling, the critics belong to a more sophisticated class of persons than the crowd of people who go to the theater. Contrary to frequent misreadings of his work, Le Bon is not an elitist. Rather, he argues that every collectivity of persons, of whatever class they may be composed, is fundamentally a different animal—with its own strange preferences and predilections—than the individuals that comprise it, and that its actions cannot be predicted by any of these individual members on their own.
This, and not because of any greater intelligence on the part of critics or movie producers as such, is what makes for the enormous difference we have been discussing between what the critics and studios expect the public's reaction to be—and what it actually ends up being. When they are watching a film in advance of its release, and trying to render a prediction as to its reception, critics and film producers can only render an individual verdict. Invariably, though, the verdict of the crowd will be something quite different.
"Without the explanation given above," Le Bon writes, "of the impossibility for theatrical managers to mentally substitute themselves for a crowd, such mistakes in judgment on the part of competent individuals, who are most interested not to commit such grave blunders, would be inexplicable." The same could be said of film producers.
Here, then, we have our explanation not only of the Fall Guy phenomenon, but of Waterworld, Ishtar, and every other notorious box office bomb in Hollywood history. Whenever these movies perform terribly, people always ask: why did the studios risk so much money on such a doomed project? Why didn't they see what was coming—especially when they should be the ones best able to predict such things, and have the most to lose if they turn out to be wrong in their judgment?
Le Bon provides our answer. It is because they literally cannot know whether the film will perform well or terribly. There is no amount of industry expertise or insider knowledge that can enable one to accurately render such predictions. This is because, in trying to make such a prediction, one is always thinking as an individual—however well informed an individual one may be; however full of film lore and Hollywood history one may be, there is still no way to know. The force that will ultimately render a verdict on the market is not an individual; it is the crowd.
Indeed, one can see this happening in one's own case. When you go to see a film, is it because you rendered an individual verdict on its likely quality? Or is it because you were possessed by a collective force greater than yourself, with very different desires and preferences?
How many of us went to see Barbie last summer, for instance, not out of any deep personal desire, but simply because "everyone was talking about it"? How many of us left the theater thinking we still "didn't see what all the hype was about"—but nonetheless urged our friends to go see it too so that we could all participate in the group conversation. Plainly, a collective judgment had been rendered that had a force and power beyond anything we in our individual capacities could foresee or control.
Have pity, then, on the Hollywood studio flop. Pity the Monster, as Dunne would call it. We must not mock the studio executives for getting their predictions wrong. It sounds like even the would-be clever critics were wrong about the likely chances of The Fall Guy. Each of them can only be wrong; because each is perforce thinking as an individual. And it is not the individual that will decide the movie's fate. Instead, it is "the mob—the crowd—the mass," as Carl Sandburg called it, that will decide.
Sandburg then added, speaking in the voice of the mass: "Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?" And he's right—at least so far as box office returns are concerned.
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