Perhaps you've heard Spider-man 3 opens today.
Of course you know this; Sony's marketers have made sure that there's not a man, woman, child, dog, cat, buffalo or single-celled organism unaware of this. The marketing budget for this little item is somewhere in the range of 150 million dollars. Combine that with a production budget estimated by some sources to be as high as 350 million, and you have half a billion dollars being spent on one movie.
Half a billion.
I used to read the comic books. When I heard this latest installment would finally throw Gwen Stacy into the mix, I had a total geek moment. When I heard the villain would be the Sandman, I thought, cool.
I'm a huge fan of director Sam Raimi as well. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say i'm a huge fan of Raimi's Evil Dead movies, since much of what he's done since has been somewhat disappointing. (Not only did he direct a Costner crapfest, he made one of the worst--For The Love Of the Game.) While I enjoyed Raimi's handling of the first two movies in the Spider-man franchise, he's become more of a technician than an artist, instructing actors to move from Point A to Point B, because that's where the CGI will take over.
And I know Hollywood spends insane sums of money to keep us entertained. That's their job.
But half a billion dollars would go along way towards insuring every child in this nation. It could provide armour for troops in Iraq. It could be used to house the homeless or feed the starving. For that matter, Sam Raimi once could have made twenty or thirty Evil Dead movies with that kind of money.
Movie-making costs are escalating in insane ways. There is gossip claiming Tom Hanks might receive 50 million dollars to star in a sequel to The DaVinci Code. Does he need the money? Does anyone think that would be a good movie?
No, and that's the problem. If you spend a fortune and make a good movie, that's one thing. But nobody in Hollywood seems to understand how to do that anymore, pissing billions of dollars away on the likes of Poseidon or Superman Returns or The Holiday, movies that fail to fulfill even the most modest demands of entertainment...but nobody seems to learn.
I have no doubt Spider-man 3 will make a fortune, and on its own terms, it might be a good movie. But i doubt that anyone who sees it will actually love it. Movies used to be a shared experience, a dream we all experienced. Now we only share inertia.
