BREAKING NEWS: Art films don’t make money

I love Nikki Finke. Her throat-slitting commentary on the film industry at her site Deadline Hollywood Daily is a favorite of mine. Just yesterday she broke the story that billionaire Sidney Kimmel is scaling back his producing efforts after a serious of indie films he backed bombed. Titles included Talk To Me, Death At A Funeral, Lars And The Real Girl and The Kite Runner. Heard of them? I hadn’t until now. His latest movie, Charlie Bartlett, goes out in theaters through MGM this weekend and is expected to be dead on arrival.

Video Business’ Marcy Magiera recently wrote a piece in Video Business, which is reproduced on her blog, where she mentions how much contempt there is for genre films in the direct-to-video world.

There currently seem to be two ways of looking at the direct-to-video business. From one—the ‘call them DVD Premieres’ viewpoint—all direct-to-video product has been upgraded to extend major studio franchises. Think Disney animation, Dr. Dolittle and Bring it On Again… and again.

In fact, when Wendy Wilson and Laurence Lerman were reporting the DVD premieres story on page 8, they found many studio execs were anxious to talk about the biz, until they found out it was that genre direct-to-video stuff we wanted to know about, in which case they took a pass.

The word ‘schlock’ may have been used.

Not by us, of course.

This sort of condescending attitude towards the Dolph Lundgren and Jean-Claude Van Damme films of the world is common. This is despite the fact that they consistently make money for the companies that produce them. I’ve had many off the record conversations with semi-important people who, despite knowing full well that their bread and butter is in genre films, hate that they have to make these movies. They wish that they could make ‘real’ movies, but don’t and won’t because they know that, as Andrew Stevens used to say, there’s a market for sausage movies.

It’s a real shame people just can’t love the fact that they’re in the film industry, as I’m sure these movies would be a lot better if the people behind them actually cared to watch the final product beyond a bottom line, financial view.