If there’s one thing the movie going public is not, it’s unpredictable. We like capes in our action movies, cancer in our dramas, pratfalls in our comedies and a dash of nostalgia for good measure. And we use Rotten Tomatoes a lot, too.
Enter Baywatch. The sleazy 24 FPSembodiment of the last five years of cinema. A big, dumb, loud, sardonic send up of all things earnest. Its got bewbs for your son, Efron for your daughter, and the skin of a popular television series your parents vaguely remember watching. If that slop doesn't look appealing enough yet, they even threw in the impossibly congenial Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to trick you into thinking you’re in on the joke (you’re not, you stupid asshole). Paramount Pictures projected this thing to open with a cool $40 million, Paramount you humble Henry you, we both know this sexy nostalgia trap is gonna do a lot better than that.
I won’t go so far as to say that there’s a perfect science applicable to any given film’s performance at the box office, but even the most desultory analyst of a nonspecific weekend is enough to confidently declare that it isn’t exactly a mired conundrum either.
Monday morning came and so did the numbers. That’s right, a whopping $18 million at the box office. $18 million? That’s less than what Get Out made in its opening weekend and that isn’t even based on a pre-existing thing. Baywatch is a flop? But how? I must have ingested at least 87 TV spots in the last month. There were posters hung up from LA to the congo. What could have possibly gone wrong?
The theory is a simple one. The relatively recent advent of review aggregate sites, namely Rotten Tomatoes, has made the general public slightly more movie-savvy, so that they will no longer pay to see blockbuster diarrhea.
You want our money? Then you gotta make a movie at least 20 percent of critics deem worth watching. Internet critics, no less. That’s the word we live in now. Moviegoers don’t want to pay for garbage unless it’s got giant robots or pirates.
Take DC Films for example. Warner Brothers, a massive institution in the entertainment biz for the last century, systematically tore apart, then rebuilt, its billion-dollar franchise in an attempt to appease critics who readily praised Marvel’s snarkier, Whedon-esque pop. DC films made lots of money, but the lingering liability of bad critical reception (and a bad score on sites like Rotten Tomatoes) was enough to scare one of the biggest companies in the business.
Conversely, John Wick and John Wick 2 are R-rated, neo-noir action films toting a budget of under $40 million dollars that managed $88 and $166 million respectively purely on the tides of positive reviews. “But what about Keanu Reeves, he’s a big star idiot.” Well, idiot, he wasn’t big enough to save 47 Ronin from bad reviews.
Despite what some studios seem to think, Rotten Tomatoes is just a review conglomerate, not some occult force of nature. This is an argument for giving paying audiences the tools to dictate what does and doesn’t get made.
Like I said earlier, this isn’t a perfect science, some bad movies (Dead man Tell No (new) Tales) and good movies (sorry Colossal) are bound to slip through the cracks, but rest assured Baywatch 2 is gonna be a marginally shinier turd.
