Hyped or Not, They Fail

Even multi-starrers keep flopping. If there’s no saying what works, why ignore the basics?

Angelina Jolie. Johnny Depp. Venice. On paper, The Tourist spelt blockbuster. The new film by director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who earlier made the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, featured two of the biggest and most beautiful stars in the world romping around in a stunning location. It was exotic and exciting and yet comfortable and familiar. In other words, a sure-shot.

Except when The Tourist opened in the United States on 10 December, not many people showed up. The film, made on a budget of $100 million, had an opening weekend of $16 million. Jolie and Depp did worse than Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler (The Bounty Hunter: $21 million) and Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz (Knight and Day: $20 million). The unkindest cut was that critics also reached for their knives. So Peter Travers wrote in Rolling Stone: ‘The Tourist reaches its own kind of perfection—it fails on every conceivable level,’ and Owen Glieberman in Entertainment Weekly called it ‘a caper that’s fatally low on carbonation.’

Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, Ashutosh Gowariker’s 1930 revolutionary drama starring A-list stars Abhishek Bachchan and Deepika Padukone, had an even more startling collapse. According to the website Bollywoodhungama.com, the film, which cost an estimated Rs 30 crore, collected a disastrous Rs 3.25 crore on its first weekend, making it one of the lowest openers of the year. Journalist Komal Nahta reported that at Sarb cinema in Jalandhar, the second show of the film had to be cancelled because not a single person showed up.

How did everyone in Jalandhar know to stay away? Old time distributors in Bollywood were fond of saying, “audience film soongh leti hai”—that is, the audience can smell a film. They intuitively know that something is not working. They refuse to be taken in by the multi-crore marketing campaigns, television interviews and assorted hype. So big name movies such as The Tourist and KHJJS don’t even show opening numbers that befit their pedigree.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the biggest financial disaster in movie-making history is Renny Harlin’s 1995 pirate saga, Cutthroat Island, which cost $98 million to make but opened at only $2.3 million. It’s not that viewers saw these movies and rejected them. They simply didn’t go.
Buzz—the heat that a movie emanates, which eventually seduces a viewer into buying a ticket—is indefinable and largely uncontrollable. Over the years, movie studios, marketing mavens and even academics have expended much effort and money in trying to decode it: what generates buzz, what perpetuates it and how to manipulate it, especially through social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

But nobody seems to have come up with anything conclusive. The Wall Street Journal recently reported a forthcoming study on buzz conducted by Northwestern University sociologist Brian Uzzi. After examining data that had thousands of people discussing hundreds of movies, Uzzi came up with the startling conclusion that there is no correlation between the marketing budget of a movie or the stars in a film and the buzz it generates. Instead, intangibles such as the title of the film or its premise or even a line in the trailer can create heat.

Which leads us back to writer William Goldman’s immortal words: nobody knows anything. Since stars, budgets, locations, hype cannot guarantee even the opening weekend, perhaps filmmakers should rely on the basics: script, craft, passion, engaging the viewer. This seems obvious and elementary, and yet, it is largely ignored. Which is why the grotesque No Problem is currently playing at a theatre near you.

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