How Hollywood Leaves Its Mark in 2015
The year 2015 has been a host to many of the worlds highest grossing movies of all time in cinema as well as some of the largest box office bombs in the past couple years. This is list is in no particular order, but the movies have been chosen for their impact or lack there of upon the history of cinema. The criteria for the impact consists of viewership appeal and monetary profit.
Star Wars: Episode VII-The Force Awakens
It’s almost the end of January and the people have spoken! Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been the talk of movie goers and fans since it’s initial teaser in November of 2014 and the hype for the movie has yet to falter. Beating out Avatar as the highest grossing film of all time is no easy feat, but in the span of three weeks The Force Awaken has shattered box office records and firmly cemented itself within cinema history as one of the most successful movies of all time. Even the ratings for the film haven’t wavered below the 93% mark on rottentomatoes.com (a reliable and highly critical movie and TV critic website). The reason for all of the excitement around the new film is that it’s able to successfully bring in new viewers and turning them into fans of the franchise in the process. Without giving away spoilers, the film manages to give viewers a great balance between fan service and good storytelling for people to rave about the story even after they’ve seen it. The impact this film has had has even extended to other people in Hollywood, who have avoided releasing their own films the same week as the film. Per example, Quentin Tarantino moved the release of The Hateful Eight to one week after Star Wars because he knew his movie would fail if it was released on the same day. It’s fair to say that the Force Awakens is a film that will be remembered for years to come as a significant milestone in cinema history due to it’s high approval and world record breaking box office numbers.
Although being overshadowed and losing it’s “2015 Highest Grossing Film” title to The Force Awakens, Jurassic World has shown that the Hollywood fad of reviving old franchises for the purpose of monetary gain is still alive and kicking. The film brings in audience members with it’s impressive visuals, quirky but charismatic protagonists, and nostalgia factor for fans of old. What’s good about that premise is that the movie can welcome in an entirely new and younger audience which is highly advantageous for the studio because it means that there is a whole new group of viewers who are welcome to a new Jurassic franchise to begin. Clever marketing also helped to establish its presence in the minds of the younger generation by making their name synonymous with anything dinosaur related up until the release of the movie. The marketing team at Jurassic world also made sure to pay for advertising spots in televised sports, department stores, and toys for children. Jurassic World was an astounding success monetarily, but it’s critical and viewer appeal was a bit shaky. The director, Colin Trevorrow, is set to make the last Star Wars film of the new trilogy which has led to a large amount of controversy due to the fear that Episode IX will be a dumbed down version of Star Wars. The fear comes from the fact that Jurassic was just your typical cash cow for studios that focused more on appealing to the audience through simplistic writing and over the top visuals to distract from the lack of logical sense and shallow characters. The story is typical, but the movie will be remembered for reviving a long dead franchise as well as being one of the highest grossing films of all time.
What do you get when you put the heads of Rachel McAdams, Emma Stone, Bradley Cooper, and Cameron Crowe (director of Academy Award and Golden Globe winning movie Almost Famous) together for a $63 million dollar love story? You get a movie that even your girlfriend wouldn’t enjoy. Aloha was destined to be a bomb for a variety of reasons, whether it being the vacant marketing campaign, the ridiculously dry story, or the fact that Emma Stone is supposed to play a Japanese woman living in Hawaii. It’s no secret that majority of the film’s budget went into paying the actors extremely high salaries, which is something that can be contributed to it’s failure. However, one of the primary reasons why this movie failed was due to it being the center of great controversy behind the scenes. The movie’s original release was to be on Christmas of 2014, but was pushed back due to development issues. The bad luck didn’t stop there, when the studio chief at Sony, Amy Pascal, had her emails leaked saying, “I’m never starting a movie again when the script is ridiculous. I don’t care how much I love the director and the actors,” and “It never … Not even once … ever works.” (Variety.com). The movie’s opening weekend only yielded $10 million, which is small considering the amount of star power and time put into this movie. In terms of the movie’s impact on the history of cinema, you won’t ever hear the word Aloha again unless it’s said to you as a greeting.
The movie your abuela (grandmother) didn’t want you to watch. Jokes aside, this is one of the most hard hitting, serious films to ever show how real the world can be. A story of violence, revenge, and deceit: the war on drugs has never been this real. A story where there are no clear atypical Hollywood “good guys”, just different philosophies clashing with one another. What has made critics and viewers enjoy this movie so much is the superb acting, real world story telling, and thrilling scenes that keep viewers on the edge of their seats. Although, the marketing for this movie was somewhat weak (due to the low budget) the movie pulled in $12,148,041 on it’s opening weekend was received well by critics and movie goers alike. It’s understandable how the movie made so little, due to the fact that the movie was so niche. The guys in marketing were no doubt having a problem sell this movie because of its R rating and male gender leaning appeal. An R rating can be bad for any movie because what that means is that less people are allow to see it and the less people that see it, the less ticket sales there are. That’s why the top 20 movies of the last few years have been PG-13. However, a movie like Sicario would never be able to pull off a PG-13 rating due to it’s sensitive material. Nonetheless, the movie was a success and will no doubt be regarded as a significant benchmark for America cinema due to it’s graphic content, expert cinematography, and an ending that sums up perfectly what the movie is all about.
It’s awful to think about, but some movies aren’t made for the viewers pleasure. Sometimes a movie has to be made to maintain intellectual property rights for specific characters as well as made purely for profit. Such is the case for this Fantastic Flop brought to us by Fox Entertainment. This movie may have made a decent amount for Fox, but it made nowhere near what was intended. The film had begun to show problems weeks before it’s release and those problems are ultimately what caused the movie to fail so hard. Upon release, the backlash was so significant that everyone involved with the project began to point fingers as to whose fault it was that the movie was so awful. Director Josh Trank stated that most of the blame fell upon the studio who had made edits days before release which messed with the movie’s continuity and pacing. The characters were poorly portrayed and comic book fans lost their minds over the changes to the characters that they had loved so much. Irrational fans initially hated that the Human Torch (Michael B. Jordan) was black, they hated The Thing’s (Jaime Bell) child like voice, and they hated how the film’s antagonist, Dr. Doom (Toby Kebbell), looked in the final edit. It also didn’t help that the script was changed frequently during the filming process, allowing lines like “Wow, look at Doctor Doom over here.” which was said by Sue Storm (Kate Mara) to the antagonist Dr. Doom in the final act of the film. Trank was originally going to be the director of Star Wars: Episode IX, but due to the movie’s extreme failure he lost the job to Colin Trevorrow. The film made 48% of it’s total domestic gross on the opening weekend which shows how the decline of viewership affected the sales because the movie was awful. Fortunately, this movie’s legacy may fade into eventual obscurity as did the other Fantastic Four films before it.
Honorable Mentions: Ex Machina, The Martian, The Big Short, The Revenant, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, Mad Max: Fury Road
Dishonorable Mentions: Alvin and The Chipmunks 4, Terminator Genysis, Mortdecai, Black Hat, Point Break
