tebop opened this issue on May 18, 2007 · 74 posts
XENOPHONZ posted Tue, 22 May 2007 at 12:36 PM
The reason why big-time movies are made kiddy-fied is a simple matter of cash.
Many people aren't aware of the fact that G-rated movies -- on the average -- make FAR more money than R-rated movies do. And an NC-17 rating is the kiss of death, mass market-wise. Sure, there are crowds who are attracted by such ratings, but the reality is that those 'crowds' represent a relatively small percentage of the market.
Surprising fact: the first R-rated movie to ever break into the ranks of the top-20 money-making movies of all time was The Matrix Reloaded.
Hollywood has begun to figure this one out (dragged along kicking and screaming all of the way). So.....one solution has been to give PG-13 ratings to movies which should actually have been rated R. And thus 'fool' the public into going to see R-rated movies.
A G rating draws bigger crowds in the theaters. A lot of people -- especially Hollywood types -- don't like to recognize that fact; and thus the movie moguls continue to turn out the type of material which causes their box-office reciepts to continue to plummet year-by-year. The biggest crowds just don't find Hollywood-leftist politcal polemics (which should be categorized as fantasy) like An Inconvenient Truth to be attractive for entertainment purposes. Why should people spend their hard-earned cash to go watch something that's boring and preachy?
Such movies are often touted by the press as great successes merely because they made more money than they cost to make. While 'conveniently' overlooking the fact that they didn't make very much........in box-office terms. No: the real crowds were going to see Shrek.
Sure -- you can feed a certain niche-market appeal with horror movies like Hostel 2. But you'll never make Shrek-type money with movies like that. You can only make Shrek-type money with movies like Shrek. Which some people think rhymes with "Drek"..........and then you can get into an argument about the utter worthlessness of pop culture in general.
If the goal is to SELL -- then you give the people what they want. Not what your ideology informs you that they should want. That's a perception problem which a lot of people have trouble with.
There's lotsa major production companies which are perfectly capable of turning out R-rated and NC-17 - rated CG movies (used to be called "X-rated" -- the "NC-17" rating was developed to try to lessen the negative cash-flow impact of the "X"). And those companies would be perfectly happy to be creating those types of movies if they could make any money with them.