Lucky You is the kind of movie that should have been a box-office slam-dunk
when it was released in the US at the beginning of May. A clever romantic
comedy set in the world of poker-playing, the film had an immaculate
Hollywood pedigree.
It starred Eric Bana, the hunky up-and-coming Australian, and Drew Barrymore,
a box-office sweetheart with a slew of romantic hits such as Never Been
Kissed and 50 First Dates under her belt.
It was co-written by Eric Roth, winner of an Oscar for Forrest Gump. The
director and co-writer was Curtis Hanson, responsible for box-office
successes such as The Hand That Rocked the Cradle, but also for critically
acclaimed films such as LA Confidential, for which he won a screenwriting
Oscar.
Lucky You opened on the same weekend as Spider-Man 3, clever
counter-programming by Warner Bros to offer women, particularly older women,
an alternative to the effects-driven extravaganza that their boyfriends,
husbands or sons were more likely to watch.
But Lucky You opened to just about the worst box-office results of the year.
It has taken less than £3m in the US, a huge loss for Warner on a film that
will have cost more than £40m to produce and to market.
Why was it such a flop? Well, without wanting to seem simplistic, because
nobody, particularly the female-skewed demographic Lucky You was aimed at,
went to see it.
Its disastrous performance will only have reiterated to the studios what has
become a self-fulfilling prophecy in the past few years: romance is dead at
the movies. The last really successful Hollywood romance was Brokeback
Mountain, and that was about gay cowboys.
If you survey this summer’s big movies, it’s obvious the studios are prepared
to offer audiences any kind of entertainment, so long as it’s not romance:
gory horror such as Hostel: Part II, family romps in the third Pirates of
the Caribbean, animated comedies The Simpsons and Shrek the Third, and
action thrillers such as The Bourne Ultimatum.
There’s even a successful line of sex comedies such as Knocked Up, in which a
beautiful woman gets pregnant by a schlubby guy after a one-night stand, and
Superbad, in which a group of high-school geeks try to get the girls they
fancy drunk enough to have sex with them.
But scan the release schedule for the kind of big-budget romances that were
once a staple of the Hollywood dream factory, or even for romantic comedies
like the ones that made big stars of Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock, and
you’ll be left scratching your head. Hollywood has stopped making films like
Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, Dr Zhivago or even Titanic, the
highest-grossing film of all time.
The most obvious reason for the end of movie romance is the brutality of
modern box-office demographics. More than ever before, a film’s fortunes are
won or lost over the first weekend of release.
“If you do come up with a movie that doesn’t hit, the consequences are as
dire, if not more dire, than they’ve ever been,” acknowledges Adam Fogelson,
president of marketing at Universal Pictures.
And who goes to see films on their first weekend? Overwhelmingly adolescent
boys, young men and the dates they drag along. These young males are
Hollywood’s most prized movie-goers, the repeat viewers who go back to
Spider-Man 3 to see cool effects they may have missed the first time. And
while the 15 to 25-year-old American male may be obsessively interested in
sex, the last thing he wants to see on screen - or will admit to wanting to
see by buying a ticket - is romance.
It’s not surprising that women, particularly women in their thirties or older,
have all but given up going to the movies. Or that when a film comes along
that might appeal to them, like Lucky You, it is just not on their radar.
“It’s Hollywood’s fault,” says Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, who
consistently creates wonderful melodramas and intriguing female characters.
“In the last decade you can count the number of Hollywood dramas that have
revolved around women. The studios have forgotten that women are
fascinating.”
Laura Bickford, producer of Traffic, agrees. “At one time Hollywood made great
movies for women with stars like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Ingrid
Bergman. They were a real genre and unfortunately that genre has almost
completely disappeared. It’s shameful, because the studios completely
underestimate the potential buying power of the adult female audience.”
Women may make up 51% of the population but Hollywood knows most older women
would prefer to wait until a film comes out on DVD.
“There’s always a female audience,” says actress Julianne Moore. “But we will
only go if they make movies for us because we’re just too busy. It makes me
crazy when people ask why women don’t go to the movies. Number one, there
are no movies for us and, number two, we have jobs and families. I never get
out of the house with two little kids. If I go, I want to know it really is
something for me. I want it to be relevant to me.”
But because older women won’t turn out on opening weekend, Hollywood has all
but lost interest in them. “In general, female markets have been
underserved,” says Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Films, “and the
over25 female audience is one that’s dramatically under-served in the
market-place.
“I don’t know why that is. You could speculate that it’s because Hollywood is
a male-driven world, with people green-light-ing the movies they feel most
close to.”
Increasingly women find their romantic urges catered to on television, by
series such as Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy.
It’s not surprising that in an industry primarily geared to sating the
appetites of the adolescent American male, almost all of the top executives
are male. Just a few years ago, when the studios did have more romances and
romantic comedies on their slates, four of the six big Hollywood studios
were run by women, including the legendary Sherry Lansing, who ran Paramount
when the studio co-financed Titanic.
Most of the people making the films, most scriptwriters and almost all top
directors are male too. Martha Lauzen, a professor at San Diego State
University, who undertakes an annual survey of employment in Hollywood,
found that last year just 15% of the directors, writers, producers,
cinematographers and editors on studio films were women.
“If you want to understand what’s going on on-screen, you have to look behind
the scenes,” says Lauzen. “There’s a statistically significant relationship
between the employment of women behind the scenes in powerful roles and
female characters on screen. With women behind the scenes, you get a
different kind of female character: more powerful, multi-dimensional.” And
more romance.
But some people believe there are deeper cultural reasons for the death of
Hollywood romance.
“Who killed the love story?” asks scriptwriter and cultural critic Adam Simon.
“The usual suspects: political correctness, the culture of transgression
and, of course, feminism. We live in an era which aspires to absolute
freedom, absolute self-fulfil-ment and absolute equality. Any one of these,
let alone all three, are inimical to romance.”
Others believe that with wide access to pornography on the internet and to
cable television stations catering to the basest of tastes, something else
is happening.
“There’s a hardening of the culture,” says Nancy Meyers, writer-director of
romantic comedies such as Something’s Gotta Give. “Reality TV has lowered
the standards of entertainment. You’re left wondering about the legitimacy
of relationships. It’s probably harder to entertain the same people with a
more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.”
Simon agrees that a coarsening of the culture is to blame. “Hollywood love
stories today, like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, celebrate awkward
innocence and the loss of virginity,” he says. “Did anyone ever want to pay
to see Cary Grant’s loss of virginity, let alone Mr Darcy’s? The old
love story was about the way experience is transformed by fidelity and
innocence.
“In a culture where you can say anything, do anything, make love to anything,
marry and then divorce anything and then start all over again, there can be
no romance because romance is about limits.”
Bring back unhappy endings
Who killed the Hollywood romantic movie? There are any number of suspects,
from the propensity of busy career women to wait for the DVD to political
correctness and feminism. But the real culprit is surely the curse of the
happy ending, writes Daniel Johnson.
Think of the great classics such as Gone with the Wind. What they have in
common is the hard-edged, usually tragic denouement. We remember their last
lines precisely because the response they evoke is not saccharine
self-satisfaction but a bitter tear.
When Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara delivers her pay-off - “Tomorrow is
another day” - we identify with it, because it is real. If Hollywood made a
remake today, she would have to ride off into the sunset with Clark Gable.
Imagine a Doctor Zhivago in which Lara does not die, but lives happily ever
after.
The greatest Hollywood romance of all is Casablanca. But what makes it so
memorable? Humphrey Bogart’s most celebrated lines, some of which have
become part of the language, are preceded by a view of love that is
genuinely bleak: “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to
see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans
in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that . . .”
Only then does Bogart repeat his catchphrase, now laden with tragic irony, to
remind her of their shared past: “Here’s looking at you, kid.” No
screenwriter today would dare put such honest sentiments in his mouth.
Until Hollywood abandons its obsession with a teenage market that apparently
cannot cope with unhappy endings, there will be no more Casablancas.
The top 10
1 Casablanca – 1942
2 Gone with the Wind – 1939
3 West Side Story – 1961
4 Roman Holiday – 1953
5 An Affair to Remember – 1957
6 The Way We Were – 1973
7 Doctor Zhivago –1965
8 It’s a Wonderful Life – 1946
9 Love Story –1970
10 City Lights – 1931
Two movies that got me into the cinema in the last few years were "Monsoon Wedding" and "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." Both were romantic, both honest, very different cultures. They were Indies that have done enormously well. I also went to see "Closer" and "Babel". And soon there'll be Julia Roberts in "Eat, pray, love" all three produced by Paramount. Romance is still there, but it's tougher. Maybe it's the right scripts that are not coming in to Hollywood.
Pamela Windo, Jersey City, USA
As a woman who loves romantic movies, it doesn't mean I'll love ALL romantic movies. They still have to be GOOD romantic movies. Most of the romantic movie schlock put out by Hollywood today is just a cynical ploy to put out something, anything, for the females, and is usually soooo formulaic. Same for all those terrible female generational bonding movies, usually set in the South for some reason, that Hollywood loves to churn out. You might as well see an action movie because at least it's not trying to be something it isn't. Plus the romantic movies hardly ever get the marketing - for instance I never even heard of Lucky You. But I do know I saw Drew's recent movie Music and Lyrics, and that was enough to scare me off her romantic movies for a long while. Still every so often, a few good romantic movies still slip out. And when they do, I know the men I know, also like them very much as well, whether they admit it ot not.
Claudia , Atlanta, USA