By Patrick Corcoran
Duel – 1 minute short film Award Winner Winning Iranian London Film Festival Film
Will the sector learn the right lessons from this summer's successes and failures?
It’s a tradition at the end of the summer to offer an opinion on the lessons learned about which films worked and why, and to extrapolate from that “what the audience wants.” This focus is always too narrow and tries to prove too much. It also leads to a mad scramble for what worked and what didn’t work this season as markers for what will and won’t work in the future. Never mind that every film is different, even films that are carefully tailored to fit the parameters of recent blockbusters and recreate the same lucrative audience.
This leads to foolish generalizations—not least that “shrinking audiences” means America is “overscreened.” But no one can tell you by how much. Where? In the vast swaths of the Great Plains and the South that made Twisters’ success possible? Manhattan? Is the correct number of screens 10,000 (The Katzenberg Constant) or some other number? It’s nonsense driven by anecdote or self-serving corporate spin.
