Producer Paul's Ramblings

This is a repost of an essay I put on a Rotten Tomatoes forum:

So, I was putting up the Christmas tree tonight and drinking some fine Scotch and thinking about Avatar and the fine folks here on the RT forums.  Here is why I think Avatar will continue to do well and rake in lots of money and maybe even take Best Picture.  Know at the outset that none of this is meant to insult anybody or take sides. They are just my thoughts.

We here on the RT forums tend to forget that, although we are vocal, we are a minuscule portion of the movie-going public. If the movie going audience was a dog, we would be the tinest flea gnawing on its ass. There are maybe forty people who come in to these debates, and only 10 or so with any regularity.

We like to think we are tuned to a higher sensibility, and perhaps we are. The arguments we have over CGI realism is driven (I’m pretty sure) by a desire to see the art form move forward, and to force the talent behind it to be the best they can be, to wow us and show us things we don’t normally see and make them as real as possible.

We also want a better story. We want to hear lines we haven’t heard before, watch plots that aren’t derivitive, and see things told in a new way.

But you know what?  THE AVERAGE MOVIE GOER DOESN’T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS.  They want to be wowed and they want to be entertained and they want familiarity. The reason Transformers and Transformers 2 did so well is because it wowed people with cool robots and explosions, had the familiarity of being a childhood memory, and had a story that, while it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, provided the basic elements and had what people wanted.  It’s no secret I didn’t like the movie, but several of my friends enjoyed it very much. That’s fine.

People like to see justice done. They like to see the good guys win and the bad guys taken down. Transformer 2 (and Transformers) had that.  And just for the record, I liked the first Transformers.

New Moon is another good excample. It had the familiarity of being a best-selling book, and the story itself is little more than a vampiric variation of Romeo and Juliet.  Again, it’s familiar. People like things they’ve seen before. That’s why they buy DVDs and watch them over and over.  Familiarity equals comfort.

And so we come to Avatar.  The special effects are extraordinary. There are some who argue differently, and that’s fine. Again, they are tuned to a higher sensibility, but to the average moviegoer, the FX are jaw-droppingly beautiful and astoundingly realistic.  As I walked out of the theater both times, all around me people were buzzing about what they saw. The friends I took proclaimed it the best thing they’ve ever seen. These are people who don’t watch “Science at the Movies” or read articles about how it’s all made. These are average moviegoers. John Q. Public.

The same holds for the story. Yes, it’s derivitive of Dances With Wolves and Ferngully and Battle for Terra and Aliens and even a little bit of Apocalypse Now thrown in there.  But the average movie-goer doesn’t care.  Again, good guys win, bad guys punished.  People want to know what’s going to happen. In a grand entertainment, they like feeling one step ahead.

Filmmakers and scriptwriters are in a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” position. If they make something too predictable, they are accused of being formulaic. If they make it too esoteric, nobody wants to watch it, becuase they don’t understand it, and thus are not entertained by it.  James Cameron had a bit of a straight jacket on him.  He spent $300 million dollars.  If he made the story too high-brow, too science-fictiony, it would have been a niche film, appealing to a very limited audience (Think about Donnie Darko or Mulholland Drive. Great movies, but limited audience appeal)

Therefore, he had to go with a familiar story, and he follows the classic three-act structure beatifully. He’s giving the audience exactly what they want. Wow factor + familirity = hit movie.  It scored 83%, which means four out of five critics liked it.  I’m guessing the audience reaction is following pretty much along those same lines, so people will tell their friends to see it, and they’ll tell their friends.  And Avatar will continue to make money. Will it beat Titanic? Doubtful.  Will it be in the top ten? Most likely.

Cameron has done exactly what he set out to do. Titanic also had the wow factor plus familiarity motif, and it won 11 Oscars and became the all-time box office champ.  And the Academy has already had a favorable screening, so don’t be surprised if, come March 2010, we see Cameron walking up to accept a gold statue. After all, it’s something we’ve seen before, and people love a familiar story.