The internet is a big place, and who the internet is mad at changes by the minute. I’m citing that as the reason why I missed last week’s Simon Pegg controversy until now.
Pegg’s comments in UK magazine the Radio Times take a lot of unpacking. There’s rightly a debate to be had about modern sci-fi movies and whether they place spectacle above depth. But that’s not what I want to talk about here. Right now I want to talk about something else Pegg alluded to in the interview: that from the point of view of its movie studio, Star Trek Into Darkness didn’t make enough money.
Now, that’s not what Pegg said verbatim. Pegg talked about how the studio (presumably Paramount?) had looked at The Avengers $1.5bn box office, and Into Darkness‘s £467 million, and decided their next Star Trek film needed to make a billion dollars more. Of course that’s just my interpretation of Pegg’s comments, which in turn are his interpretation of what he’s been told by the studio. But it does raise an interesting question.
Why does the next Star Trek film have to make as much money as The Avengers to be considered a hit? I understand that movie studios are corporations, and it’s in their internal logic to want to try and find ways to make more money. But while not being a particularly great film, Into Darkness is still the highest grossing Star Trek film ever.
There’s a video game reviewer whose work I follow, who has an interesting take on what’s wrong with the video game industry. To (badly) paraphrase his argument: video game publishers aren’t interested in making a lot of money unless they can make all of the money.
Recently, I’ve begun to suspect movie studios are increasingly driven by the same logic. If a movie doesn’t make a billion dollars, it’s a flop.
Last year The Amazing Spider-Man 2 came out to pretty poor reviews. It also seemed, thanks to media coverage and uncertainty from Sony studios about future films, that it was also a financial flop. Now, without defending the quality of the movie, Amazing Spider-Man 2 made $709 million worldwide. Imagine the schools and hospitals you could build with that?
After cinema fees, advertising and its $255 million budget, I don’t know what Sony Studios final profits were for the film. But maybe that’s part of the problem. The number of films with budgets over $200 million has been creeping up for years and it means studios are forced to define success as a higher and higher bar. When a ‘tent-pole’ movie only makes a small profit studio executives are somehow disappointed. If it’s a financial flop? Well, that means lay-offs.
In 2002, Sony managed to make a Spider-Man movie – that was both profitable and enjoyable – for $140 million. That obviously still sounds like a lot, but it begs the question: why did the last film need the extra $115 million?
Sony could learn a few things from one of their biggest hits last year. 22 Jump Street, on a tight $65 million budget, made back its costs five times over. Hell, Divergent made less than that and still managed to launch a franchise.
As a movie fan, one of my least favourite things to do is talk about how much money a movie made. To someone who cares most about the creativity and story found on the big screen talk of ‘opening weekend’ profits is a necessary evil. Who cares that Cloud Atlas barely made its money back? It’s a masterpiece. And it was a masterpiece because it let itself be what it was.
To an entire generation of people, Star Trek is Patrick Stewart and company on the bridge, exploring new worlds and offering a positive vision of the future. For my parents’ generation it was Kirk, Spock and McCoy doing basically the same thing. While I wouldn’t call my self the biggest Star Trek nerd I do have a soft spot for Next Generation and Voyager (I know, don’t judge me). It’s a sci-fi series that has qualities that speak to certain people.
And there are lots of other people who love Star Trek for this – twelve films and five live action TV shows attest to that. But I honestly don’t think $1.5bn worth of people want to see a Star Trek film.
And that’s fine.
Star Trek is not a tentpole movie franchise. Robocop will never make $1 bn. Prince of Persia wasn’t ever going to pull massive audiences to the cinema first time out.
And that’s fine.
Now let me list some other films and franchises: Divergent, The Maze Runner, Lucy, Resident Evil, Django Unchained. The connection? All of them are considered popular films or franchises and none of them have made a billion dollars. The reason? Because movie studios didn’t mortgage their future on them.
Starting with the expectation that your movie is going to break box office records is a fool’s errand. Not everything has the capacity to have a billion dollar audience. I like Star Trek, but after two glossy action films, it’s clear what its limits are in terms of drawing money. Trying to broaden its appeal would just dilute what people love about it.
Maybe having that one franchise that can deliver a billion dollars every few years is just too tempting to resist for movie studios. But people’s jobs, their rent, their kids’ education, depend on the films your movie studio puts out. Going big on one bet is how a gambler thinks. Instead of blowing $185 million on one film, make two films for half the price. The Hunger Games cost less than $80 million to shoot.
In Hollywood it’s easy to hurt someone’s feelings by saying something that can be taken the wrong way. Right now, in the middle of writing the script for Star Trek 3, Simon Pegg has probably said the most controversial thing he can get away with. Star Trek should make you think about what it means to be human – it’s not the sort of series that fits well with forcing an over the top action scene every twenty minutes. Hell, that’s what we have the Avengers for and even that was starting to feel exhausting by the end of Age of Ultron.
After Into Darkness reigned in less than half a billion in 2013, Paramount decided to slash the budget of its sequel by a reported $20 million. But considering the past box offices of ALL the other Star Trek films, this seems baffling. Experience of the reboots should tell Paramount that Star Trek has enough fans to make about £400 million. If they keep betting big and expecting another sequel to make the kind of money no Trek film has made before – well, that’s the kind of irrationality that led to a global recession.
You don’t need to spend $180 million to make a good sci-fi film, and it doesn’t need to make a billion dollars to be a success.
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