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December 22, 2009

Big budget + Big stars = Success?



Biggest movie of Matt Damon before Bourne identity, Oceans 11, had him in a 20 minute role probably.
Biggest movie of Sam Worthington before Avatar, Terminator 4, wasn;t exactly a success, or that much of a role of him.
Biggest movie of Keanu Reeves before Matrix, Dude wheres my car.
Same can be said abotu Tobby McGuire and so many more.

I was talking to a friend of mine about how HW is making a killing by taking smaller stars and the money they save over there, they put in effects and marketing. How many special effects movies of Denzel Washington have we seen? Or Tom Cruise, that is when he is not the producer?? Not many, right? Because it doesn;t make any sense when you end up paying more than half of your budget to big stars and are left with limited resources to liven up your movie.

How many of us watch movies for stars, and how many of us watch movies to see a good movie? If star was the only criteria, I bet Mangal Pandey, Swades, Paheli, KI, all of them would have been huge hits, right? But the biggest success stories of the year 2009 have been Ajab prem, and out of blue (no not Blue) 2012. A John Cusak movie doing what Akki movies couldn't, get a blockbuster tag.

And success of 2012 in India has nothing to do with script, but just effects, which director managed to introduce because of the money saved in hiring big names. but then doesn;t it pose another question? Why Drona, LS2050?? My theory is that though they were special effects oriented movies, but then problem was that they tried to do too much, and better idea is to do 2-3 good sequences rather than doing 10 pathetic ones. For example, KMG, it has a few sequences, but they were good ones, thats why the movie was actually lapped up by the audiences, and you can;t even say it was HR, since he was having a torrid time on BO at that time.

Well, this is one article I once found to support my theory:

Hollywood studios are now thinking twice about splurging on A-list movie stars and costly productions in reaction to the poor economy, but also because of the surprising success of recent films with unknown actors.
Link to the whole article

4 comments:

Pardesi said...

Kunal - biggest movie of Damon had him in the lead in GoodWill Hunting, Oscar nominations and all. Keanu was in many a film, none huge but come on what Johnny Mnemonic, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure! LOL! But your point is very well made.

Kunal said...

But Pardesi, that movie had him taking Oscar for writing, and I am talking about commercial success, I don;t think Goodwill Hunting was a commercial success, not as much as Ocean's 11.

Also same about Keanu, he came in a few movies, and they were ok, but nothing like him making into a star, forget about big, he wasn;t even a smaller one.

BTW Bill and ted's adventure, love it

Pardesi said...

I loved both GW Hunting and Bill and Ted - and I do think they were very good successes. GW Hunting made $138,433,435 in the US and B and T made $40,485,039. Good figures those for the time and scale of film.

Kunal said...

My next point is, is HW going to spoil us?
Look at the effects of 2012, Avatar, BW would never be able to match them considering the difference in budget, and I think even Indian sfx companies are not of the same standards.
So can this be a reason for under-performance of Drona and likes??
Considering how 2012 was lapped up, I don;t think script is too much of an importance to Indian audiences.

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