Universal Pictures distribution chief Nikki Rocco says the studio is going "back to the drawing board" following the box-office failure of the critically praised Cinderella Man.
In an interview with USA Today, Rocco remarked, "Good movies are supposed to buck this [downward] trend. You hear how it’s all about the product, but we have an excellent movie that people just aren’t turning out for. [The problem is] something bigger."
Meanwhile, New York Times media writer David Carr has blamed this year’s slump at the box office on a tectonic shift in the industry that has increasingly seen filmmaking focused on "the wants and needs of 17-year-old boys on any given Saturday night."
In a feature article appearing today (Monday), the day after the critically reviled Dukes of Hazzard posted a $30-million opening at the box office, largely by attracting male teenagers, Carr wrote that he had interviewed several studio directors who declined to speak on the record but who "sounded less like masters of the universe than prisoners of the current paradigm."
In the article, Carr quoted David Thomson, author of The Whole Equation, A History of Hollywood, as saying, "In the same way that audiences have lost their taste for film, filmmakers have lost their passion. … It is not surprising that some of the moguls are giving up as well. They are as depressed and tired of the business as the rest of us."
Carr concluded: "The people who built the current version of Hollywood did so by coming up with movies that people felt compelled to see — not as a matter of marketing, but as a matter of taste. What was once magic, creating other worlds in darkened rooms, has become just one more revenue stream."
