Prestige Pictures

Dirty Harry asks What Happened To The Prestige Picture? and has an answer:

When you look at the best Picture nominees of the last three years it’s astounding to realize that of the 15 nominations, only three cracked the $100 million mark — two by a whisker. The average box office gross of the 2006 nominees was $59 million; in 2005 it was $49 million. Another way to look at it is that 98% of the population just wasn’t interested. 

While there’s still plenty of prestige films left to be released in 2007, as of now things are looking even worse: Michael Clayton, In The Valley of Elah, Lust Caution, Sicko, The Brave One, Eastern Promises, Into The Wild, The Darjeeling Limited, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age, have each been, or are looking to be, very expensive flops… Or, are they?

To call these films failures is fair in the sense that audience indifference is quite spectacular, but not when you take into account that audience reaction had little or nothing to do with their conception. Prestige films are no longer produced for public consumption by moguls eager to feed a public hungry for smart challenging stories –instead they’re produced by Hollywood for Hollywood, and to impress critics, festival-goers, and awards’ judges. It’s easy to blame this shift on an American people eager to see their Transformers, but in fact it’s Hollywood that’s changed.

Nice post, interesting points.