A Very Hollywood Renaissance

This weekend's box office numbers may look just as they always do every week, but there's something hidden beneath those numbers. Namely, the massively budgeted, 200 million dollar Disney flick John Carter has pretty much bombed. It should have been a surefire success. The film is based on Edgar Rice Burroughs sci-fi classic "A Princess of Mars," which was released in 1917 and inspired such films as Star Wars and Avatar. The connections with those two films alone point to a hit. Then if you throw in Andrew Stanton, the acclaimed director behind Wall-E and Finding Nemo, making his live-action film debut, there's even more cause to celebrate. But then it all fell apart.

Disney somehow managed to make a 200 million dollar epic look uninteresting. The marketing for John Carter was terrible. There was no draw to seeing the film whatsoever, and the ads and trailers made the film look bland and boring. Then the box office numbers came in, and John Carter made around thirty million dollars. That's a lot of money, sure, but not for this kind of film. And while the film may be doing well overseas, it will have a hard time even making its budget back in the States. So, what does this epic's box office bomb mean for Hollywood, and therefore, for the movies that we will now get?

Though they will not be thoroughly gone, epic films will be harder to come by. Even before John Carter bombing, an expensive film adaptation of The Lone Ranger starring the incredibly bankable Johnny Depp was scaled back budget wise. It's now shooting, but with nearly fifty million cut off of its budget.

Along with the bombing of John Carter, one has to look at the success of recent films like Project X and Chronicle, both "found-footage" films, or films from the perspective of a character with a camera. These films are immensely less expensive to produce than films like John Carter, and while they may not make anywhere near the amount of money larger tentpole films will make, they manage to easily recoup their budgets and make a tidy profit for the studios that produced them. These recent successes have paved the way for other found footage films, which will likely be coming out in droves over the next few years.

John Carter's failure has proved a warning for most every Hollywood studio. Projects like a massive motion-capture version of Paradise Lost (Which was set to star Bradley Cooper). have been shut down simply because they are too expensive. These films also provide a risky financial venture to take, especially when it is so easy to produce a quick little found footage film for dirt cheap, and make about ten times the money put in. Even big budget films are being retooled. At one point, there was to be a 100 million dollar film based on the Ouija board, but now it has been retooled to be a cheap five million dollar found-footage film. It's the prime example of how Hollywood is changing.

As for the quality of these films, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll be better. While a low budget does usually spark creativity to a degree, there are plenty of low budget films where the camera is just shakily pointed around for an hour and a half with no clear point or reason.

However, if they follow the suit of films like Chronicle, which managed to take the tropes of found footage films and turn them on their head, we could be in for a kind of renaissance for Hollywood. Younger, newer filmmakers, who often helm found footage films, will be given more shots and opportunities to prove themselves.

Also, the bigger budget films that will still be produced will likely be sure-fire hits, likely sequels or prequels to previously successful properties, and that's a shame. There will definitely be less big budget risk taken in Hollywood due to the disappointment of John Carter, not that there was much risk taken anyway. And while that may hurt a bit for people only interested in big blockbusters, it will be interesting at least to see what younger filmmakers can manage to do with low budgets and their creativity as their films are now the future of Hollywood, for now.