This summer has seen more blockbuster movies than ever, with bigger and bigger budgets. But they may contain the seeds of their own doom, according to Damon Lindelof, who has written or co-written several such films, including Star Trek Into Darkness and World War Z.
In an article written by Scott Brown for New York Magazine and reprinted at Vulture.com, Lindelof refers to "destruction porn" and points out that each movie needs to try to top the previous ones.
He says, "“Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world. And when you start there, and basically say, I have to construct a MacGuffin based on if they shut off this, or they close this portal, or they deactivate this bomb, or they come up with this cure, it will save the world—you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. And in many ways, you can become a slave to it..."
He calls it Story Gravity, but I think maybe Story Anti-Gravity is better--a force that lifts the story farther and farther from reality and makes it and the budget expand more and more.
There are only a certain number of settings that lend themselves to this big a treatment, another reason they feel so repetitive; when the same aesthetic is applied to one it doesn't fit you end up with The Lone Ranger (the biggest flop of the year so far). Lindelof's Cowboys & Aliens did't do too well, either.
Then there's the multiple-writer effect. A Hollywood film typically will have a succession of writers, each asked to escalate the action or bring some new element into the story, until finally the thing is a big mess. (On one movie I script-doctored, not a blockbuster, I was the 11th rewriter.)
Balloons burst when they get high enough, maybe the same will happen to this genre when enough high budget films fail because even from the poster we can tell we've seen this story before, often enough that we don't want to pay to see it again.
Blockbusters are not my favorite type of film anyway, but usually I see the big movies just to stay on top of what's going on in the film world. This summer I stopped after Man of Steel and I won't be sorry if the blockbuster falls to earth.
