Is it Time to Shelve the Studios?

With the Awards season finally passing and a new summer of blockbusters looming, the question now has to be asked, with the likes of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland storming the box office, are the current crop of studios good for the industry? This last awards season may have been the big bucks against the pennies, in the Avatar vs. Hurt Locker battle, but is it right for the film companies to survive on one or two cash cows such as Avatar and Transformers? Is it just that companies such as Paramount and Fox should make vast sums of money from the money spinners and then waste it on dire romantic comedies and action films.

Paramount have made over a billion dollars from the two Transformers films alone, but yet have made heavy losses due to making endless rubbish, such as Eddie Murphy comedies that have more laughs once the credits have rolled. The system is just not working. Again, MGM are making vast sums of money from the James Bond franchise, but they still do not have enough money to put The Hobbit films into full scale production, as debts built up from losses on rubbish films have caught up with them. The studios are taking the public for fools and there needs to be more projects, that are willing to resist the fat debt-ridden cheques of the studios and fund creativity and ideas, not the accountants.

There have been examples of going outside the main studio system before. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner was funded by a consortium of producers and banks: it may have become a cult classic, but it unfortunately never became the juggernaut at the box-office it needed, to revolutionize the current order. The new movie Kick-Ass, which hits screens this April, was rejected by all the studios, because it was not "mainstream". In response to this, the producers decided to finance the film themselves and when director Matthew Vaughn, presented a 20 minute clip to the Studios two years later, they were all begging to be apart of the film's distribution.

With Kick-Ass as a key £30 million example, is it possible to sweep the current crop of financiers aside and still create the key money makers, that keep the film industry going? I think so but not just yet. There are no signs of a Che Guevara of Studios coming to replace quantity with quality, but Kick-Ass and Oscar winners such as Slumdog Millionaire, show that films can be produced independently and still appeal to the mainstream. We cannot abolish the studios because the industry needs the blockbusters to survive, but the green shoots are starting to appear that could, just could, revolutionize the industry.

Rhys Hancock,
Editor