Hollywood needs to put its studios on budget

Hollywood is in a slump and we'll all be better for it. For weeks, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and other trade publications have been preaching a gospel of doom and gloom, pointing to a steady decline, compared with last year, in ticket sales.

The reasons are significant. Accelerated DVD release schedules mean that patient viewers simply must wait only a few months before they can watch the film in their living room. In addition, there haven't been any surprise blockbusters like last year's The Passion of the Christ, a real windfall to 2004's tally.

What has happened is that studios have flooded the box office with a glut of expensive, and often ill-conceived, movies. For every Batman Begins success, there are two The Island-style failures. For every movie enjoying a strong opening, there are two or three staggering out the gates and stumbling to a stop before their first week in theaters has expired.

The trend cannot, and will not, come without long-lasting effects. I predict that the days of the big-budget extravaganza, the movie made marvelous by throwing fistfuls of cash at it, are over.

Wallowing in a sea of red, studio executives can't be blamed for hesitating to give a big-budget film the go-ahead. They understand that it's fiscally irresponsible to make a movie for $150 million when a movie such as The Wedding Crashers, produced on a much smaller budget and collecting larger receipts, is a much stronger business model.

There's a good chance we could be looking at a Golden Age in the American cinema. Studios might stop making extremely expensive movies. That means fewer explosions, alien invasions and plots depending on the specialized skills of a special effects supervisor.

Where does that leave Hollywood? For the past 25 years, it has depended on a formula of larger and louder to attract patrons to the multiplex. It leaves them searching for a new formula, a new product that will attract an audience. With spectacle out of the mix, an intriguing, old-fashioned set of tools is left to work with. Things such as story and character.

Imagine.

This is not new territory. In the 1960s and, to a lesser extent, the 1970s, Hollywood found itself floundering after a few high-profile failures. Movies such as Cleopatra and Ryan's Daughter had proved the spectacle to be unreliable at the box office, leaving a void filled by smaller and artistically daring movies. It was a financial climate very much like the one gripping the film industry today that gave us Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Dr. Strangelove and Animal House.

We can only hope to get so lucky again.

Reach Steven Uhles at (706) 823-3626 or steven.uhles@augustachronicle.com.