I opened the entertainment section of my local paper today and saw the box-office receipts for the top grossing five movies. I got to thinking about how a lot of movie websites and magazines post the same information. These are not trade publications, mind you. They're just publications for people looking to figure out which movie to watch.
So I got to wondering. Why do we care how much money movies are making? Should information about how well a certain studio's business is doing be reserved for a stock ticker, or is it information worthy of the front page of the Entertainment section in most papers? Why aren't Toyota's year-to-date sales for the Camry in the Entertainment section? What's so newsworthy about a movie's numbers?
You may ask, "Well, what does it hurt?" I'll call it the effect of "The Number One Slot." We all know what it means to be number one. At the Olympics, the gold medal winner is on the top podium. They get their national anthem played. They've earned recognition for their talent, dedication, and hard work. But the amount of money the movie Cars is making is no true gauge of talent, dedication and hard work. It's simply a gauge of what is sufficiently entertaining to the broadest number of people.
I think the not-so-subtle message we're reading in the Entertainment sections of our newspapers is "good films make lots of money." And for somebody who's opening up the paper in hopes of being guided to a good movie, that's a false promise.
Aren't we being told "these are the most popular films"? I've always read those as a (grossly capitalist) corollary to the bestsellers list in the literary section (wherever that is in your local paper). And don't papers often publish similar things about automobiles in the "automotive" section (though, I suppose, not on a week-by-week basis)? Lord knows it's no way to pick a movie--just as the bestsellers list is no way to pick a book.
It would be easy to write this off as a phenomenon of cynical capitalists and the sheep they control, but perhaps there's more to it, and something important about the fact that we are told not simply that A-E are the 5 top-grossing films this week, but that we are generally told their stats ($25 million or whatever in box office revenues). I can't think of anything else about which this is true (some CDs, perhaps, but not CDs routinely or in general). Is it because the money involved in film--corporate film, of course, but even much "indie" film--is mind-boggling to most people. Even really expensive pop CDs cost an order of magnitude less to make than most movies. Books, obviously, cost even less. Somehow we seem to be fascinated with this aspect of movies in a way that we aren't about other kinds of entertainment, which, in itself, is an interesting thing.
Posted by Jaybriel on July 26, 2006 07:41 PM