The re-make of Ben Hur could be interesting
As the wheels fall off Ben-Hur, where next for the Hollywood blockbuster?The summer season has seen more than its share of box office flops, and nervous studios are already looking for the next big thingViolence, slavery, high-speed chases, good versus evil – and all in Roman outfits. When it comes to blockbusters, the $100m Hollywood production, Ben-Hur, did seem to have more than a burly charioteer’s chance of winning the summer box office race.
Yet, as the dust settles on the tracks of all those hooves and wheels, the New Testament-era extravaganza is set to go down as one of the renowned flops of hoary Hollywood anecdote. Its probable losses look to be careering towards the $75m mark.
What makes matters worse, on Friday Disney Pixar proudly announced that after only four weeks in cinemas Finding Dory, the animated sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo, has already crossed the finish line as the biggest grossing animated film of the year in Britain and Ireland, taking £34.3m in box office receipts so far. In America it is already the biggest animation film of all time.
In sad contrast, Ben-Hur’s only achievement is to lead the lineup of mass-market misfires this season, losing more money than Sony’s female-led remake of Ghostbusters or Fox’s Independence Day: Resurgence.
Part of the problem for Ben-Hur is that audiences are now generally much better informed about what they choose to see. Despite all the excitable PG marketing, even 10-year-old boys are capable of asking each other “Did it get good reviews?” and then scrolling down their phone screens to find out that it did not. “The new Ben-Hur is an oddly lacklustre affair: sludgy and plodding … an epic that feels like a mini-series served up in bits and pieces,” judged Variety. The film also earned a score of just 28% on the review site Rotten Tomatoes. In the face of these verdicts, an action-packed trailer, stoked with deep-voiced superlatives, is no longer enough to woo the inexperienced cinemagoer.
The calculation made by the studios involved, Paramount and Metro Goldwyn Mayer, was that the potential audience for Ben-Hur would be located somewhere at the intersection between thrill-seeking fans of spectacle and the devout of the American Bible belt. The British actor Jack Huston, not yet an international name, was cast as Judah Ben-Hur, a role once played to truly epic effect by Charlton Heston in the 1959 William Wyler classic. Wyler’s film cost a tenth of the amount (still a lot of money back then), then paid for itself more than 80 times over and won an alarming 11 Oscars. Its chariot racing sequences, staged in a vast mock-up of Rome’s Circus Maximus, set a high bar for cinematic action for many years. Both the 1959 film and the 2016 version, directed by Timur Bekmambetov, are based on a hugely popular 1880 novel by Lew Wallace. His book, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, was at the top of the all-time American bestsellers list for years before it was knocked off by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, a novel that would soon provide Hollywood with one of its other great, genre-defining hits.
So Ben-Hur is clearly a good yarn, telling as it does the struggles of a young Jew, who is betrayed, meets Christ, and then serves as a Roman galley slave before becoming a charioteer and facing down his enemies. Why then did it fail to find an audience this time around? Instead of following on from the sand-stomping popular triumph of Gladiator in 2000, or the unexpected box office appeal of Mel Gibson’s gory faith-fest The Passion of the Christ in 2004, Ben-Hur made only $11.2m in ticket sales in America and Canada on its opening weekend and only $10m overseas.
A waning public appetite for big-screen sandal sagas cannot, it seems, be fixed by computer generated graphics. The 2010 film Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, 2014’s Exodus: Gods and Kings and then Gods of Egypt, out this year, all got the thumbs-down from the crowd. The American churchgoing phalanx is also hard to rely upon when it comes to an opening weekend. While they can help put a smaller-scale religious-themed feature into profit, in 2014 the expensive Old Testament drama Noah, starring Russell Crowe, proved a bad risk. The makers of a new virtual reality treatment of the life of Christ, premiering in Venice this week, now have a well-established trend to buck.
“In a way the flopping of Ben-Hur confirms what we think we know about Hollywood at the moment,” said Peter Kramer, a film expert teaching at the University of East Anglia, “which is that it is only doing well at franchises and sequels.”
Though far from a dead cert, a sequel is simply a safer bet. “As the old William Goldman Hollywood saying has it, ‘Nobody knows anything’, but there is a good chance the sequel of a profitable film will make money,” said Kramer. “It might even be more successful. It is the one exception to that rule. And when a big film needs an investment of about $200m, and then around $100m in marketing, it is not surprising studios opt for them. As a critic and a consumer, I would like more range, but you can see why they do it.”
Pixar alone has been able to make money from a run of original screenplays in recent years, although it stepped into line this summer by producing its sequel to Finding Nemo. The cynical argument runs that neither creativity nor critical plaudits count for anything in Hollywood now. The only objective, according to this reading, is to keep making films so that film executives get paid.
Yet, as Kramer points out, not all re-makes are bad. The film business will lumber on, he suspects, regardless of Ben-Hur’s scary swerve off track.
“There have always been flops throughout film history and none of them have ever affected the industry as a whole,” he said. “A few of them have contributed to bringing down a studio, as with Fox and Cleopatra in 1963, and with United Artists and Heaven’s Gate in the late 70s, but individual flops rarely make a difference.”
In the wider picture, Hollywood is doing pretty well. While box office receipts globally were down a little on last year, that was a strong year, buoyed by titles like Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Kramer concedes there is a developing problem with DVD and Blu-ray sales, because high growth in that market has inevitably dropped off. “But we can’t draw any conclusions about a crisis. Particularly since you will never get real information about production or marketing costs from a studio, so you will never know exactly what was spent in order to get a true idea about profits.”
If there is to be a collective pause for thought among studio executives and producers, it should perhaps be focused not just on how to use new technology to best effect, but on what kind of stories to tell. There is a general sense of casting around for a new tone in entertainment, once all the comic strips have been plundered.
The next blockbusting franchise may well come from an odd side alley off main street; a subculture, just like the epic space sagas and the super-hero stories once were. This certainly worked again recently in the case of the teen vampire fiction that gave birth to the Twilight movies.
A story, however outlandish, will become popular when it relates to real concerns, either directly or indirectly. It might even be possible for another Bible-based story to rocket to the top of the charts, but only if its emotional landscape fits the times.
For Kramer the change in Hollywood mood music, when it comes, is likely to reflect a fresh emphasis on female audiences.
“Women are historically thought to have been a less reliable ticket buying audience, but the latest figures in the US show women are now buying the majority of tickets,” he said. “With Twilight, and even more so with the Hunger Games films, Hollywood found a way to make big adventure and action films that appealed to women as well. We can watch the way the Marvel comic character Black Widow develops and see what happens with the new Wonder Woman film next. Some changes are coming, I think.”
Guardian