Challenging Filmz for Wide Appeal Success

[WorldForgot]

Let me introduce this thread with a dicussion from the discord chat:

[1:50 PM] yes!: What was the fanbase like in its infancy? Like post late 90s-punch drunk love. Were there always guys like dickhardwood or did social media and Twitter make it more uncivilized
[1:51 PM] Jeremy: There was way less discussion about PTA in general. He was barely known compared to how it is now.
[1:53 PM] Jeremy: The fanbase on the ptanderson.com forum was tiny, and that was post-Magnolia. Just a handful of us. TWBB changed things.

 Jeremy: In the Magnolia/PDL era I feel like PTA was still fighting for respectability. Loads off cinephiles and critics thought Magnolia was dumb.
[2:17 PM] pynchonikon: Once he was fighting for respect, now he's fighting the high expectations.
[2:22 PM] yes!: I was youngish then, but I still remember the tv spots and read reviews later on and the reaction was very divisive critically
[2:23 PM] yes!: Boogie nights was the fun breakout movie but didn't light box office on fire, magnolia was complete opposite and did worse financially lol
[2:24 PM] yes!: I know general audiences hated pdl but was the Sandler stigma still that strong
[2:26 PM] yes!: My impression is that as soon as he announced PTA, he got the side eye the entire time and never benefit of doubt
[2:27 PM] pynchonikon: Will he ever make a flick that the wide audiences will instantly love?
After the last one I seriously doubt.
[2:33 PM] yes!: its impossible.

What does it take for a film to challenge its audience and still reach wide appeal? It's often been mentioned that before HBO or premium cable, Cinema could bring the ruckus in terms of thematic mature content that television couldn't. Now we're well into the streaming-age of television and distribution, and Disney dominates the percentage of cinema bringing in dough.

I posited in 'Xax-discord that to my mind that last great era of oscar contenders that were challenging and had wide appeal were perhaps Babel, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, maybe? That era definitely though. Jeremy offered this list of grossers as a herald that no real challenging film has ever broken the bank. Perhaps Nolan, but not even, if we take ourselves seriously when we speak of challenging. Parasite had good word of mouth and awards buzz, but was it really widely successful? Probably only in film-centric circles, right?

Personally, PTA's Jazz project sounds very interesting. More interesting than Coppola's Megalopolis as the sort of film that could play chain/franchise cinemas and still be unconventional, an autuer vehicle.

Yes made a bunch of posts chronicling how strong Licorice Pizza was able to hold at the Box Office this Winter. If we move the bar away from tentpole IP, iz Licorice Pizza actually a wide appeal success? Can any auteur pull this off these days? Are we set for decades of autuership-blockbusters dressed as super-hero films ala Joker and The Batman? At least Joker had the guts to be R-Rated...

[Jeremy Blackman]

Since our convo I've thought of a few decent examples that you could probably call "challenging." I'm including your examples too. We can argue qualifications or merit, but this is my best attempt. (It's hard!) Ranked by worldwide box office:

Spirited Away - 395 mil
American Beauty - 356 mil
Black Swan - 329 mil
Parasite - 263 mil
Us - 255 mil
Get Out - 255 mil
Pulp Fiction - 213 mil
Arrival - 203 mil
Vanilla Sky - 203 mil
No Country For Old Men - 171 mil
Eyes Wide Shut - 162 mil
The Hateful Eight - 157 mil
Babel - 135 mil
Natural Born Killers - 110 mil
Fight Club - 101 mil
The Thin Red Line - 98 mil
Jojo Rabbit - 90 mil
Drive - 81 mil
Manchester By The Sea - 79 mil
There Will Be Blood - 76 mil
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - 72 mil
The Tree of Life - 62 mil

To your question "what does it take," from this list I can only conclude that it takes a genre angle or a major star, the latter of which is becoming less of a thing.

[Yes]

High concept genre angle is the closest thing to a "success" for non-IPs nowadays. Horrors/sci-fi usually hits for this reason alone. But even then, most conceptual horrors or sci-fi are not "challenging"—they are fun. That's why they hit. Big ideas that guarantee fun, thrilling theater experiences.

The days of prestige dramas crossing over might be over because studios do not make them any longer. If they happen, they're usually Searchlight or A24 slow-rollout Oscar plays. Manchester By the Sea getting to 60+ worldwide. And secondly, these films require a star—a mega star. And only dependable megastar nowadays is Leonardo DiCaprio. Leonardo DiCaprio turned Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Revenant, Wolf of Wall Street, Django Unchained, Great Gatsby, Shutter Island, The Departed into hits, but opinions vary on whether these are "challenging" films or wise career choices to appease the masses. The star power is now otherwise dead because audiences flock to IPs or the biggest current stars now like The Rock....let's just say, Jungle Cruise is not a challenging film.

[Jeremy Blackman]

I had no idea Manchester made that much. Wow. I'll add it to the list.

Leonardo DiCaprio turned Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Revenant, Wolf of Wall Street, Django Unchained, Great Gatsby, Shutter Island, The Departed into hits, but opinions vary on whether these are "challenging" films or wise career choices to appease the masses.

Those aren't bad movies, I love most of them, but they're probably not "challenging." Personally I'm thinking of "challenging" as pushing the form in some significant way and/or being artistically/conceptually/philosophically confrontational.

[Yes]

I think PTA's issues are:

-He's not a genre, high-concept filmmaker. What are the logline selling points for his movies? "Dressmaker enters a co-dependent relationship", "A stoner detective tries to solve a mystery involving his ex-girlfriend", "An alcoholic war veteran finds himself lured into a cult", "A prospector drills for oil", "A emotionally disturbed man falls in love with an odd woman".MGM sold LP as "Gary and Alana run around and fall in love in 1973". He doesn't make easy movies to describe, compared to the films mentioned on JB's list like Get Out.

-He rarely works with A-list stars. Cruise was buried in the ensemble of a 3 hour drama. PDL was Sandler's first "dramatic" movie and it was an oddball comedy. I mean, Bradley Cooper is one of the biggest movie stars and he's in about 8 minutes of LP! (And we saw Cooper strike out at box office this year with Nightmare Alley).

Licorice Pizza is currently at 28.5m worldwide. 17m domestic. Higher than The Master, Inherent Vice and just below PDL (17.7m). Phantom Thread made 21 in America. Boogie Nights 26m and 22m. So LP isn't far off from what PTA normally does, which is interesting since we're in a different landscape. Spielberg's West Side Story did under 40m which is a bomb and far below his standards. A horrible result normally for PTA, but post-pandemic... not that bad in context. For comparison, Nightmare Alley did 35m worldwide (and less than LP domestically). Mostly just says he cannot break out of that niche

[Yes]

I had no idea Manchester made that much. Wow. I'll add it to the list.

Leonardo DiCaprio turned Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Revenant, Wolf of Wall Street, Django Unchained, Great Gatsby, Shutter Island, The Departed into hits, but opinions vary on whether these are "challenging" films or wise career choices to appease the masses.

Those aren't bad movies, I love most of them, but they're probably not "challenging." Personally I'm thinking of "challenging" as pushing the form in some significant way and/or being artistically confrontational to some degree.

I agree. The most "challenging" is probably The Revenant..but still, that's an action survival revenge thriller. He's not exactly doing Eyes Wide Shut here

[Jeremy Blackman]

He's not a genre, high-concept filmmaker. What are the logline selling points for his movies? "Dressmaker enters a co-dependent relationship", "A stoner detective tries to solve a mystery involving his ex-girlfriend", "An alcoholic war veteran finds himself lured into a cult", "A prospector drills for oil", "A emotionally disturbed man falls in love with an odd woman".MGM sold LP as "Gary and Alana run around and fall in love in 1973". He doesn't make easy movies to describe, compared to the films mentioned on JB's list like Get Out.

This is such a good point. I just listened to Unspooled's episode on Boogie Nights, and they describe this exact issue. BN's plot synopsis does absolutely nothing to convey why it's a great movie. The magic is in the texture of the film, in its nuances and human details.

[pynchonikon]

Looking at JB's list, even with the well-known factors (Kubrick's brand name and death, Cruise+Kidman, advertising) in mind, it's truly insane that EWS reached these numbers, wow.

I aggree with the genre-angle discussion, and the fact that studios become less and less willing to invest in auter-driven expensive "challenging" films than cannot guarantee a profit (the B.O. underperformance of Ad Astra comes to mind as a recent example).
Of the commercial genres that were already mentioned, PTA has expressed interest to do horror. Kubrick turned to the genre after BL's lukewarm B.O., hiring an a-list star as the crowd-puller.
Nobody knows for how long he will be able to get funded for his hard-to-describe mid-budget projects by a studio that supports the traditional distribution, so we"ll see.

[WorldForgot]

American Beauty - 356 mil
Black Swan - 329 mil
Parasite - 263 mil
Vanilla Sky - 203 mil
No Country For Old Men - 171 mil
Eyes Wide Shut - 162 mil
Babel - 135 mil

These stand out to me because we can't give them the genre excuse so much - they have big name stars but their scripts are aiming to discombobulate the audience.

PTA is interesting because he aims to be dizzying and confront the audience's preconceptions, but all his films have a compassionate heart, so when I read this list, Vanilla Sky goes down the easiest, and any of Paul's iz a smoother drink than Babel or EWS. I'm starting to think that LP *was* his wide appeal success after TWBB.

[Yes]

Parasite is at least a thriller so it's genre adjacent. PTA's movies are either "weird comedy" or "dark drama". Even LP which is a light dramaedy is "weird" and "offputting" for general audiences. And while all his films have humor, they're not seen/sold as comedies, or the humor is lost on the majority. Inherent Vice was sold (falsely) as a broad comedy and we saw what happened there

I still think without pandemic, LP makes like 30-40m domestic looking at "similar" Oscar films pre-2020:
Three Billboards- 54.5m (161.4m worldwide)
Lady Bird- 48.9m (78.9m worldwide)
Manchester By the Sea- 47.6m (77.7m worldwide)
The Favourite- 34.3m (95.8m worldwide)
Jojo Rabbit- 33.3m (87m worldwide)
Boyhood- 25.3m (57.2m worldwide)
Call Me By Your Name- 18m (41.7m worldwide)

Of course a lot of these aren't challenging, but awards buzz can take certain films far. American Beauty, Black Swan, Parasite, No Country, Babel were Oscar nominees or winners.

[Jeremy Blackman]

I was also thinking that the "thriller" label can be a lucrative hook. Black Swan, Eyes Wide Shut, and American Beauty were all marketed as erotic thrillers to some degree.

[Yes]

The erotic drama has sadly flamed out. In 2002, something like Unfaithful did 52m in America and over 100m total. Nowadays, Deep Water gets sent to Hulu and the streaming abyss meaning if American Beauty gets a release, it's either streaming or a speciality studio like Searchlight. So it would have made like 1/4 of 350m it did in 99. Gone Girl was close to an erotic thriller, but Fincher usually makes fun, commercial movies and it was a bestselling pulpy book adaptation.

Goes to show the interests between PTA and Fincher. PTA adapts Pynchon, Fincher adapts Ben Button and airport novels.

I guess that explains why TWBB remains his biggest moneymaker. It's his biggest Oscar film, had some political/social topicality being about the greed of oil drilling, and while darkly dramatic and heavy, resembles SOME elements of a thriller. The trailer and title made it seem like a horror almost.