Hollywood Has Sci-Fi On the Mind: Are They Risking Audience Fatigue?
Has 'Avatar' started a fad poised to die off in a few years?
Photo: 20th Century Fox
As one of RopeofSilicon's news contributors, I spend a lot of time scouring the web for casting news and updates on the progress of in-development projects to post in one of my news roundups. Something I've noticed over the past six months or so is a massive uptick in the number of sci-fi movies heading into production. It seems like every other day a new journey into space or story exploring the boundaries of human capabilities is getting the green light from a major studio.
This is clearly in response to the overwhelming success of recent movies like Star Trek, District 9 and, especially, Avatar. And now the success of Battle: Los Angeles has had its own influence on the market.
Before you start thinking "there have always been a lot of sci-fi films," here's a rundown of the titles I'm referring to:
Gravity: After flirting with Angelina Jolie as the lead this film is finally getting underway with Sandra Bullock starring as the sole survivor of a space mission trying to return home to Earth and her daughter. Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) will direct for Warner Bros and George Clooney co-stars.
Old Man's War: Wolfgang Petersen (Troy) will direct for Paramount Pictures. The John Scalzi novel adaptation centers on a 75-year-old man who trades his body in for a new one, allowing him to combine the experience of age with the strength of youth and join an outer space military coalition sent to protect human colonies in outer space.
Horizons: Disney's Horizons (once titled Oblivian), directed by TRON: Legacy's Joseph Kosinski, takes place on a future Earth where civilization lives above the clouds and scavengers collect ancient artifacts from the polluted surface below. Karl Gajdusek (Trespass) was recently hired to give the script a rewrite.
The Runner: Disney is developing The Runner as a vehicle for director Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace). The film takes place on a future Earth rendered uninhabitable by a devastating attack, where a small group of survivors in the Rocky Mountains send a man back in time to stop it. But it turns out their volunteer's priority is with saving the love of his life.
Now: Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) is helming for 20th Century Fox. The film stars Amanda Seyfried, Justin Timberlake, Cillian Murphy and Olivia Wilde and revolves around a society in which aging stops at 25 and the rich are immortal, while the rest struggle to stay alive. Sound a tad like Logan's Run to you, too? Just wait.
Logan's Run: Warner Bros. is prepping an update of the 1976 sci-fi classic for Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) with Ryan Gosling in the lead role.
Photo: Columbia Pictures
Elysium: Perhaps one of the most promising pictures on the board at the moment is Neill Blomkamp's follow-up to District 9. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but the film stars Matt Damon, Jodie Foster and Sharlto Copley and has already set a March 8, 2013 release date. The legendary Syd Mean (Blade Runner) will design the sets.
Two more titles were announced just this week after Battle: Los Angeles claimed the #1 spot at the box-office, though this time the wars will be waged outside our planet. Sony has Agent OX, based on a spec script about a human spy living on an alien planet who must stop an invasion of Earth. 20th Century Fox picked up an untitled pitch that will be written by David Callaham (Doom, The Expendables) for producer/director McG (Terminator Salvation).
And how could I talk sci-fi without mentioning Prometheus, which will see genre legend Ridley Scott return to the Alien universe he introduced us to more than 30 years ago. 20th Century Fox will release the film in June 2012 with Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron and Idris Elba among the principal cast members.
Oh, and there was that news about Warner Bros-based production company Alcon Entertainment securing the rights to sequelize and/or prequelize a little film called Blade Runner.
A bit overwhelming, right? Like I said above, it seems like a clear response to the success of such films as Star Trek, District 9, Battle: Los Angeles and Avatar. It's the process of looking for the "next" film in this iteration and I can't help but recall previous moments when Hollywood flooded the market after one film saw overwhelming success.
In 1978, John Carpenter's Halloween grossed $47 million on a shoestring budget of just $325,000. 1980s slasher producers and screenwriters literally began flipping through the calendar looking for new dates for their killings to take place, inspiring titles like Friday the 13th, Prom Night and My Bloody Valentine. By the late '80s, the well had run dry.
More recently in the horror genre we had the "torture porn" phenomenon, where knockoffs like Hostel, Captivity and The Collecter shamelessly tried to capitalize on the surprise success of the Saw franchise. That seems to have passed now that Paranormal Activity has made low-budget found-footage ghost stories all the rage. Enter Area 51, The Devil Inside and Insidious.
Spider-Man inspired a slew of superhero adaptations when it crossed the $400 million domestic mark in 2002. Though dozens of comic book films followed, only The Dark Knight would top it. And that film was a perfect storm of sorts. The genre now seems to be trending downward, with fatigue being the leading cause. I predict The Dark Knight Rises will mark the end of the genre's heyday.
Gladiator single-handedly revived the "sword and sandal" genre in 2000, grossing $187 million in the States and taking home five Oscars including Best Picture. Of all the impostors that followed (King Arthur, Alexander, etc.), only Troy bested Gladiator's worldwide gross. And none of them had the same success on the awards circuit. These movies were almost always compared to Gladiator. Usually unfavorably.
To this day, filmmakers are still trying to emulate the gritty look of Gladiator. Such is the case with Jonathan Liebesman, who wants his Wrath of the Titans to feel like Gladiator with fantasy elements added in. The guy must be a big Ridley Scott fan, as his Battle: Los Angeles was made to feel like a sci-fi version of another Scott film, Black Hawk Down.
That's admirable. There are worse directors you could choose to emulate, but doing so sets you up for comparisons to the archetype. Good luck with that.
This sure seems like a whole lot of similar-sounding films that are going to be released within a two or three year span, but I'm sure Hollywood will ride this wave until it passes — just as they have in the past. But in my view, the only way to truly inspire an audience to show up en masse is to deliver something they haven't seen before — or at least in a very long time.
If the aforementioned fads taught us anything, it's that moviegoers are willing to embrace something new and exciting. But they are quickly desensitized — whether we're talking decapitations via Jason's machete or yet another CGI-fueled skyscraper fight sequence. It doesn't take long for a fanbase to develop a "been there, seen that" attitude and start looking for something fresh.
Avatar offered nothing new story-wise, yet the visuals were unlike anything we'd ever seen and allowed most of us to look beyond that. But what happens when blue (or red, green, purple, what have you) motion-captured aliens start taking over movie screens once every month or so. The eye popping visuals aren't going to have the same impact if we just finished sitting through four trailers of equally impressive effects and elaborate intergalactic landscapes.
I guess that brings us back to the reason most of us keep going to the movies: We want to be told good stories. Most, if not all, of the films I mentioned in this article will have production budgets up around (or beyond) the $100 million mark so they'll likely all have astounding effects. The real question becomes which ones will stimulate our minds as well as our eyes and ears? There's bound to be plenty of Ghost Riders and Daredevils among them, but is there a film in the bunch that will grab our attention and do for this wave of sci-fi what The Dark Knight did for the superhero genre?
Is Avatar just the tip of the iceberg? Or will it continue to be the stick by which all space adventures are measured? I can't help but wonder what the marketplace will look like once James Cameron finally gets around to releasing Avatar 2 at the end of 2014. Will it be just far enough out to start the cycle all over again?
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I dunno. I'm pretty excited for Gravity, and the casting of Prometheus and Elysium gives me hope that there is some real imagination and creativity going on. I'm much more worried about how soon all of these superhero movies are going to stop making money.
I cant wait for John carter of Mars. People will say its copying Avatar. But this pulp classic is going to be way better than avatar if done right.
Idris Elba, Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender on screen at the same time is almost erotic to me.
I seriously can't see how it can end up going wrong.
Elysium is exciting.
I'd much rather have Hollywood putting their faith in science fiction films than the never ending barrage of superhero films we've received for the past decade.
Seriously, how many times can I watch the same story in different tights?
I gotta say this whole article was a pretty great read.
This has been happening in Hollywood since forever, you could go way back to period epics of the early 60s as the genre pretty much exploded after Ben-Hur but was near-death after 5 years. At the end of the day there's one thing that matters: the story. Of all those upcoming sci-fi films listed, I think there are five movies at best that have some real potential in that regard. Prometheus and Elysium are the safest bets; Gravity could go either way; normally I wouldn't have any interest in Now and Logan's Run, but I hope Andrew Niccol and Nicolas Winding Refn (whose work I love) could bring some fresh prespective, and the actors in both movies are very good too.
But there's another half and these movies sound either as uninspired as they come, or sound simply like they are all about concept. The curious thing is that there probably wouldn't be any other way; I mean it couldn't be possible for only the promising movies to exist. Potential greatness always comes with potential crap. Which is what sooner or later kills any promising sub-genre, or even a fatigue like 3-D. Audience gets excited, studios put projects in development, but by the time they come to theaters, audience gets tired. It's a natural thing, an endless circle, if you will. The thing that interests me is when (if ever) studios are going to break away from it, or it's just going to go on and on.
P.S. I realized while I was writing, a TOTAL RECALL remake (Len Wiseman, Colin Farrell, August 2012) isn't on your list. I think it most definitely belongs there as, potentially, one of the more utterly uninspired projects of the bunch.
Let's not forget "apocalyptic disaster films" which were started by, what… Independence Day? We were doomed by aliens, meteors, comets, volcanoes, global warming, the Earth's core… really anything that was capable of busting up a famous landmark through an FX shot.
"Before you start thinking "there have always been a lot of sci-fi films,"…"
You know, it seems like that but honestly that's not the case. Sci-fi films that feature alien or futuristic worlds were actually few and far between among the major releases in the late 80's and most of the 90's. You had films set in modern times with sci-fi elements, certainly (Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Back to the Future series, Predator, etc.) but actually having a film set in the future or on a fictional world was rare and mostly confined to Star Trek or Alien sequels. I remember 1994's Stargate being considered a hit based on the idea that it was the first sci-fi of its kind in many years. (I personally never managed to sit through all of it, so I must not have been as starved for Sci-fi as others.)
And really, looking at the track record of futuristic or alien sci-fi since then, it wasn't until 1999 with the beginnings of the Matrix films (which started out by appearing to take place on Earth in the present, mind you) and the Star Wars prequels that you began to see an "outer space/future" type Sci-Fi film every year… and most of those weren't well liked (Arguably all of the Star Wars prequels and Matrix sequels, the Planet of the Apes remake, Lost in Space, the Island, etc.) or remained a very small, niche-centric picture.
I wonder if Hollywood will find Avatar's success as hard to duplicate (on any scale) as Star Wars' success was back in the early 80's.
Sci-Fi is one of my favourite genres (if not my actual favourite) so I won't get tired of them.
The question, as is eternal, is the quality of the films. Which is not actually to say I don't also like silly sci-fi as well along the way. I like a selection of films all the way through the range from 'Independence Day'/'Avatar' to 'Blade Runner'/'Twelve Monkeys' with everything inbetween as well.
I don't like them all though (Battle: LA was still abysmal for the genre). But I do think the author is bang on that the success of Avatar has been a driver in bringing it back. The problem is that is also equally bang on that not all of these films can be big hits at the box-office, although some will do well.
Avatar 2 is the next film that clearly has even a shot at Avatar style returns though (and whatever one's opinion of the first film, no one should underestimate what Cameron can pull off when he's in full control of a BIG project. Side stuff like 'Sanctum' is irrelevant in the long term) but sci-fi can pull in decent box-office if it's done well enough ('District 9', 'Star Trek' being recent examples) and I look forward to many of these upcoming films.
Avatar already started a fad that died off in a few years, it's called 3D.
Exactly right, and the success of Alice in Wonderland didn't help either.
No Kevin, Sci-Fi will still be around for long time. It's been that way since the 1950's. Besides I'm excited for Avatar 2, Elysium, Gravity and Prometheus! And I'm a huge Sci-Fi fan. Duh.
I too found this article to be well-researched and very interesting.
Although many of these titles look promising I agree that audience fatigue could easily set in. But i do have to disagree on the fatigue setting in for Superhero films. I think the 2000s found success in the beginning of the decade with superhero films and ever since the Dark Knight have found them successful again, there are so many looming superhero flicks coming out its crazy. Think Thor, X-men spin offs, Captain America, Green Lantern, etc.
Once they stop being sure-fire money makers, Superhero Films will die down. I don't think they'll ever die out though… The 60's saw an explosion of spy thrillers, but when they made way for the next big thing it's not like James Bond disappeared on us. There will be a few favorites that can always be trotted out for new adventures, and they'll still take stabs at new ones every now and then.
Really though, superhero films need to find a transition into new story structures to remain at all fresh. They can't all be about learning responsibility.
Sounds good, I love sci-fi flicks and as long as the story and movie is good then it will last like comic book movies did.
I can definitely see the possibility of the masses getting sci-fi fatigue, but unlike (for the most part) the previous genre runs I think this group includes some incredible filmmakers. Cuaron and Scott are two of the better filmmakers working today and aren't knew to the genre. Then you have Petersen who hasn't come close to matching Das Boot, but I hold out hope this has a chance at coming close. Winding Refn seems to be coming on strong as a filmmaker. Forster has made a lot of good films, though I'm not sure how he'll adapt to sci-fi, Niccol has also written some strong films, may actually be perfect for sci-fi. But in my opinion the one that has the most potential of the bunch is Blomkamp's Elysium. As the last year has shown, moreso than the recent past, quality is what brings people to the theatres, and there is the potential for a lot of quality here.
wasn't inception a sci-fi, i think that film did well both commercially and critically….
All "Dark Knight" did was follow the trend. Richard Donner was the one who ignited the super-hero genre. It was "X-Men" and then "Batman Begins" that reignited it with it's current "edge."
As far as I'm concerned no one has touched Avatar yet in terms of visual effects. It is so far above anything I've seen in theatres that I can"t wait for the sequels to come out.
You forgot the "make a live-action film of an old Saturday morning cartoon" fad which STILL hasn't gone away.
As long as no one remakes zardoz I'm ok.
Book of Eli…
I don't think so sci-fi or super hero genre ever die on BOXOFFICE. Matter of fact is no genre will ever die on box office, if quality is maintained. If you have a good story. it doesn't matter which genre it is. It will be a HIT. Genre will only decide how big. But if you have bad story it doesn't matter it is super hero or sci-fi..it will be a flop. So, it is even rubbish to talk about fatique causing genres to die.
You'll never hear peoples saying that: OH! I heard this movie is super cool super good but Ididn't watch this because it Sci-fi and I'm tired watching this genre.
Point is..People want entertainment..doesn't matter it is sci-fi,superhero or any other genre..If you have it….It'll bring peoples in the cinemas
I don't think so sci-fi or super hero genre ever die on BOXOFFICE. Matter of fact is no genre will ever die on box office, if quality is maintained. If you have a good story. it doesn't matter which genre it is. It will be a HIT. Genre will only decide how big. But if you have bad story it doesn't matter it is super hero or sci-fi..it will be a flop. So, it is even rubbish to talk about fatique causing genres to die.You'll never hear peoples saying that: OH! I heard this movie is super cool super good but Ididn't watch this because it Sci-fi and I'm tired watching this genre.Point is..People want entertainment..doesn't matter it is sci-fi,superhero or any other genre..If you have it….It'll bring peoples in the cinemas.
Moral of story is: Quality is what matters most!
I think it's actually good having a lot of sci-fi in theaters. It promotes creativity
I think there is an interesting idea to toss around in how these trends reflect the zeitgeist. The glory days of SciFi have always been in reaction to economic or political stress in the United States. That would certainly seem like now. And the Superhero boom seemed to do best in the wake of 9-11 when people were clamoring (consciously or not) for a hero and some shape of hope. The glut of slasher films seem to be a reaction to a more conservative social movement during the early 80's. This is not always a perfect group of parallels, but it is very compelling to view films as lenses of their time and not dollars and cents (of course, it would imply that viewers put their money behind films that are in some way demonstrative of their times and still works).