From embracing diversity to freezing inflated movie ticket prices, there’s some work to be done in show business next year.
Update the MPAA's ratings system.
The MPAA has long ruled the film industry — and audiences — with an iron fist, deciding which movies are and aren't acceptable for certain-aged people to see.
The organization — which is run by the six major Hollywood studios — decreed long ago that two utterances of the word "fuck" requires an R rating, while graphic violence is suitable for PG-13 films; the MPAA has also been far more accepting of sex scenes between men and women than it's been toward any sort of intimacy between same-sex couples.
The past year has seen several public blows against the MPAA's ironclad rule. In November, Philomena — a bittersweet British film that features Judi Dench as an elderly woman dealing with the loss of her son years prior — was given an R rating because of its two f-bombs. The Weinstein Company, which distributed the film in America, appealed the ruling, and ultimately, the MPAA gave in and reduced the rating to a PG-13.
Around the same time, a study conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Ohio State University revealed that films with a PG-13 rating now contain more gun violence than those tagged with the restrictive R. That caused another surge of headlines about the MPAA's hypocrisy, and the IFC Center in New York City showing the Palme d'Or-winning Blue Is the Warmest Color, despite the NC-17 rating it got for lesbian sex scenes, led to even more buzz.
The MPAA should really resolve to change with the times in 2014.
Lionsgate / The Weinstein Company
Vet your reality TV stars (and have a conscience).
Was anyone who watches Duck Dynasty actually surprised that the show's born-again, preaching redneck Phil Roberston was not all that fond of gay people? I mean, if there was anything hypocritical about the way A&E handled Robertson's gross comments in GQ magazine, it was suspending a guy for essentially living up to expectations.
Basically, the network was making as much money as possible off Robertson and his family, giving them a gigantic platform, and then acting scandalized when the patriarch said something A&E should have expected him to say.
Even worse, the network caved just nine days later.
The lesson here that is A&E — and every other cable channel that lives off of base reality TV — should take care about what it puts on air.
Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Seek out and give platforms to a diversity of voices.
A lot has been written about how 2013 was the year of "the black movie," a gross generalization that BuzzFeed's Shani Hilton went in depth to discredit. "Lumping together heavy dramas with lighthearted romcoms simply because of the skin color of the actors or director prevents these films from being measured against the whiter counterparts that actually share their genre — inadvertently ghettoizing the former and protecting the latter from scrutiny," she wrote.
Meanwhile, for all the talk of female empowerment in Hollywood, there are no true Best Picture front-runners that were written or directed by a women.
There is often a clamor amongst fans and critics for more films with "non-traditional" protagonists, aka women and people of color. While that is obviously an important and laudable goal, the real endgame is empowering such overlooked talents to make their own movies and TV shows, to end this century-old patriarchal, permission-based system.
There were a number of great films from women this year — Jill Soloway's Afternoon Delight was Quentin Tarantino's favorite film of the year when he released his list this fall — but cult success is often washed away with time; only more mainstream attention can establish a foothold.
Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed
No more unwanted reboots (seriously).
There are, in theory, at least two advantages to making a new movie or TV show out of a pre-existing pop culture property: There is built-in public awareness of the subject and its characters, and often a studio already owns the intellectual property rights.
On the flip side, as we've seen quite often over the last few years, awareness of a property doesn't mean that people are actually interested in seeing it revived.
This summer, The Lone Ranger bombed hard for several reasons, including the fact that it was a bloated, disjointed mess starring a dude who inexplicably wore a dead bird for a hat. But Disney, which produced the film, also grossly miscalculated how much the public wanted a new version of an ancient, outdated TV show that no one waxes nostalgic about very often. The same thing happened with Johnny Depp's effort to make a new film from the weirdo '70s soap opera Dark Shadows in 2012.
True, those that saw Dredd (a reboot of the 1995 Sylvester Stallone film Judge Dredd) last year seemed to like it, but the reality is that the sample size there was quite limited. The reboot of Robocop may face a similar fate.
Yes, there has been an onslaught of comic book films that have done quite spectacularly at the box office, but those are adapted from properties that never went on decades-long hiatus. Beyond springing for those blockbusters, however, audiences have exhibited a demand for original ideas and experiences — see the nearly $700 million Gravity has made worldwide thus far — and there's no way developing these new properties could cost anywhere near the $250 million that Disney sunk into The Lone Ranger, anyway.
There will be no end to the proliferation of franchised entertainment in Hollywood, but it would behoove studios to think more carefully about the old properties on which they gamble.
Disney
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