5 ms·

What's it like to have your film flop at the box office?

8 points by selvan 15y ago

cousin_it 15y ago
The answer disappointed me. Okay, I get it, you felt bad when your movie flopped. But you didn't address the interesting part of the question: "Don't they know how bad it is before it comes out?"
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  I'll address it, as I have worked on many bad movies :-) The answer is that no, you don't know how bad it is, and you may not even know after it comes out. Sure, you know about its shortcomings, and you also know about its good points. But you don't know what the audience wants, and neither does the audience. One person's idea of cheesy is another's sentimental moment, one person's idea of refinement is another's idea of overworking, and so on. On one level, filmmaking is a craft where you manufacture entertaining stories, in written and then animated graphical form. There are formulas that work in certain ways to manipulate the audience's expectations or communicate information about the story in certain reliable ways. Amateur films look bad because the unschooled auteurs waste a great deal of time trying to achieve very basic tasks like keeping track of where people are in space or how people are reacting to each other. On the other hand, you're dealing with intangibles like excitement, humor, fear, curiosity and so on, and have only a hazy idea of the context in which your film will be seen and judged. It takes years to develop and refine the sense of what an audience will respond to. Look at James Cameron; one of the most successful film directors of all time, with a bunch of Oscars to his credit for everything from artistic to technical achievement, not to mention a ginormous pile of money. Now go back and look at some of his early work like...like...Piranha II. It's awful in many ways. But that's a stage you have to go through, and there's no guarantee you'll get out of it. If you're making something like a car or a bicycle, you can test whether it works or not very easily: the laws of physics will give you a clear answer. Art is something different. You have rules of thumb that get you most of the way there, but nobody knows for sure what will work. It's like trying to assemble a clock out of jello.

8 points by selvan 15y ago

The answer disappointed me. Okay, I get it, you felt bad when your movie flopped. But you didn't address the interesting part of the question: "Don't they know how bad it is before it comes out?"

anigbrowl 15y ago
I'll address it, as I have worked on many bad movies :-) The answer is that no, you don't know how bad it is, and you may not even know after it comes out. Sure, you know about its shortcomings, and you also know about its good points. But you don't know what the audience wants, and neither does the audience. One person's idea of cheesy is another's sentimental moment, one person's idea of refinement is another's idea of overworking, and so on. On one level, filmmaking is a craft where you manufacture entertaining stories, in written and then animated graphical form. There are formulas that work in certain ways to manipulate the audience's expectations or communicate information about the story in certain reliable ways. Amateur films look bad because the unschooled auteurs waste a great deal of time trying to achieve very basic tasks like keeping track of where people are in space or how people are reacting to each other. On the other hand, you're dealing with intangibles like excitement, humor, fear, curiosity and so on, and have only a hazy idea of the context in which your film will be seen and judged. It takes years to develop and refine the sense of what an audience will respond to. Look at James Cameron; one of the most successful film directors of all time, with a bunch of Oscars to his credit for everything from artistic to technical achievement, not to mention a ginormous pile of money. Now go back and look at some of his early work like...like...Piranha II. It's awful in many ways. But that's a stage you have to go through, and there's no guarantee you'll get out of it. If you're making something like a car or a bicycle, you can test whether it works or not very easily: the laws of physics will give you a clear answer. Art is something different. You have rules of thumb that get you most of the way there, but nobody knows for sure what will work. It's like trying to assemble a clock out of jello.