In what was unanimously acknowledged as a sign of the end times in cinematic circles, The Emoji Movie came in second at the box office last weekend, the latest app-centric spin-off earning $24.5 million (R325m) in theatres throughout the US.
Glass-half-full types were eager to note that Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s ambitious historical drama, held steady at No 1, indicating Americans haven't completely lost their minds (or collective taste).
But the fact that a cynical cash grab could find even the slightest purchase with audiences sent a chill of revulsion down the spine of anyone who still considers film, if not an art form, at least subject to such old-fashioned notions of purpose, integrity and craft.
At Sony Pictures, the studio behind The Emoji Movie, the lesson was a dubious one: as Pamela McClintock wrote in the Hollywood Reporter last week, the company knew it had a dog on its hands, so withheld it from most critics before it opened; the few who went to Wednesday night previews weren't allowed to post their pans until midday on Thursday, hours before The Emoji Movie began rolling into theatres.
“What other wide release with a (Tomatometer) score under 8% has opened north of $20 million? I don’t think there is one,” said Josh Greenstein, president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Sony, when McClintock interviewed him. He sounded as proud as a farmer who had just sold a poke full of pigs to an unsuspecting butcher.
Greenstein may not have taken into full account the hair-tearing desperation of parents eager to distract kids whose last PG-rated animated movie was Despicable Me 3 in late June. And he might find that his enthusiasm has dropped just as vertiginously as The Emoji Movie’s box office numbers, which by yesterday had already plunged by more than 50%, indicating cataclysmic word of mouth.
No matter: Sony’s following a similar playbook with another late-screener, The Dark Tower, hoping to beat discouraging reviews to the punch with the brand names of Stephen King, Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. (As of this writing, with 20 critics reporting, the sci-fi fantasy had earned a 20% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, along with a prominent green splat.)
Studios have been trying to outrun bad reviews since the inception of the medium, most recently by organising their business model around “critic-proof” adaptations of comic books, toys, games and now iPhone apps, certain that the core audiences for those properties would turn out in droves, whether the movies were any good or not.
But no sooner had Hollywood doubled down on that strategy than – unsurprisingly – it started to fail, with such high-profile bombs as John Carter, Battleship and The Lone Ranger or, this year alone, Baywatch, The Mummy and the latest Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers movies. (Tellingly, all have made up for poor state-side performance in foreign markets.)
Did bad reviews – or, more to the point, their cumulative throw-weight on such aggregation sites as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic – sink those movies? Studio marketers may do all they can to blame their failures on snooty critics, bypassing the “fake news” of poor notices with carpet-bombing TV ad campaigns. But it's more likely that audiences simply saw dreck for what it was and ratified the critics’ opinions among their peers.
Today, reviewing is a companionate enterprise, with critics and “civilians” engaging in a dialogue rather than one-way pronouncements.
After all, every film-goer deserves a healthy, well-balanced, thoughtfully prepared movie diet – no one can survive on overripe tomatoes and pigs from a poke alone.