Old Directors Need to Stop Hating the Players and Hate the Game

 A couple months ago, legendary director Ridley Scott's movie The Last Duel flopped at the box office.  Hard.  Like, really hard. (I don't think his Gucci movie a month or so later was exactly setting box office records either.)

No surprise then the director went on record, first whining about superhero movies (two of which, Venom 2 and Shang-Chi made more in one night than his movie made domestically its entire run) and then whining about Millennials and their cell phones and whatever, whatever, whatever.

Scott is just the latest to whine about superhero movies and all that stuff.  The thing is, it usually comes off as the old man screaming at kids to get off his lawn.  These guys who came up in the 70s like Scott or Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorcese need to understand that it's 2022 and the world is different.  Basically the entire structure of the movie industry is different than when they started.  Back when Scott first did Alien there were barely VCRs or Betamax and probably only like 100 people in the world had them.  Multiplexes weren't even a huge thing yet.  It was pretty much theaters with maybe a couple of screens and drive-ins.  Now you have chains of multiplexes with fake IMAX screens and 3D and you have streaming, DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K.  It's a whole new world.

For old directors there are really just a few options.

1.  Adapt:  maybe not make superhero movies but something more appealing to younger audiences.  Not historical dramas about French knights or whatever.

2.  Die:  not literally but figuratively by retiring

3.  Go small:  do passion projects in small release and/or streaming.  Basically accept that your audience doesn't go to theaters much anymore.

For someone like Scott, who in 20 years has only had one hit movie (The Martian) it's probably better to do 2 or 3.  Quit or if you don't want to, just accept the inevitable that people aren't going to theaters to watch historical epics anymore.  You got lucky once with Gladiator, but that was it.  I mean, it's not the 1950s and 60s when you were watching movies.  Contemporize, man!

I think Scorcese has pretty much been doing 3 by mostly doing movies for Netflix though I think that Irishman one was still pretty expensive.  Coppola has been pretty much doing smaller movies for a while through his own studio.

The only one who's really been able to walk the fine line between commercial movies and serious movies is Steven Spielberg.  Since the 90s he would sometimes do a commercial movie like Jurassic Park and then the same year do a serious movie like Schindler's List.  Not many others have really managed to do that.  Kenneth Branagh is another who has directed Shakespeare movies but also Thor and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.  Sometimes a more commercial director will do a more serious passion project like Michael Bay doing Pain & Gain, which was I suppose about as serious as he gets.  It's hard to go do both, so most wind up doing one or the other.

One of the hard things to get writers to understand in critique groups and stuff is that if you want to succeed, you need to understand the market.  You've got to know the audience and gear towards them.  If you're someone like Ridley Scott you can still get movies made even though it's stunningly obvious they'll flop, but if you're an unpublished author (or just have a couple of small credits) it's very unlikely that your passion project is going to get published if it's not commercially viable.

First, publishers are probably not going to want your 2000-page tome about Swedish goat herders in the 19th Century or whatever.  Second, even if they don't reject the notion just from the surface, you're probably not as good as, say, Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, both of whom could get epic tomes published and somewhat commercially successful.

You have to think about what people want.  They aren't going to read your book just because you love it.  That was Scott's problem with The Last Duel.  Why the hell should Millennials (or anyone) want to watch a movie about French knights?  Besides just that it's a historical drama, the marketing also didn't really spell out what the movie was about or how it could relate to modern audiences.  When you throw Covid into the mix as well, it was a recipe for disaster that everyone--Scott, the movie's producers, and the studio execs--should have seen coming.  Poor marketing+Pandemic+Unrelatable Subject Matter=Flop.  

As a writer or would-be writer, you have to do that math too.  Does my subject relate to today's audience?  Am I marketing it as well as I could?  If you're not doing those things, then you're not likely to get it published or to get much interest if you self-publish.  That's just the sad reality.

It's like a coworker says far too often:  it is what it is.  The market is what it is and you can either go along with it or you can quit.  There's no use bitching about it even if you're a legendary, award-winning director.  It's like trying to fight the tide or an avalanche--you're pretty much guaranteed to lose.