My favorite annual national parlor game -- debating the Academy Award for Best Picture -- now begins in earnest. The nominations will be announced in a couple of weeks and this year the speculation is fervid because the race seems so wide open. No single movie is the big front-runner. Including The Incredibles, the animated story of a family of superheroes that was fantastic in every sense and, I will go out on a limb to say here, the best Hollywood movie of 2004
 
But I also find it interesting to try to suss out the year's interplay of quality and *commerce*. What kinds of movies performed best at the box office, and why?
 
Here, based on the movies released during 2004, are The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Hollywood Executives:
 
1) Unless you are producing a huge movie directed at kids– Lord of the Rings last year, The Incredibles this year – you can forget about making a lot of money *and* being the subject of Oscar buzz. It's not so much that the Motion Picture Academy penalizes commercial success, of course; it's that audiences don't reward high quality. The Day After Tomorrow, a silly movie about environmental apocalypse, grossed $187 million at the box office. On the other hand, two terrific movies, Sideways and Finding Neverland, have each taken in *one seventh* as much.
 
2) If you want to produce a serious drama, make it an action picture.  Among the biggest-grossing 30 films this last year, only one is a traditional drama in which the characters don't shoot or stab or blow up each other. All the other dramas – The Bourne Identity, Collateral, Kill Bill 2, Man on Fire, Hero – are full of mayhem.  The good news: most of them were good movies.
 
3) If you want to make a commercially successful comedy, it must either be animated (like Shrek 2, or Shark Tale or The Incredibles) or else star Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler. Stiller and Sandler were in *most* of the most successful comedies of 2004.
 
4) Even if you're not making a comedy, don't make a completely humorless film. Several expensive humorless movies failed big this year: King Arthur, The Village, Troy . In fact, absolute humorlessness rarely succeeds– only twice in 2004, by my count, with the Bourne Identity and The Passion of the Christ.
 
5) Alas, beware the period picture. There were about a dozen such movies last year, and weirdly, none was a real commercial success: whether they were set in ancient times, like Alexander and Troy; or the Dark Ages, like King Arthur; or the 19th century, like The Alamo, Vanity Fair, The Village, and Around the World in 80 Days; or the first half of the 20th century, like Finding Neverland, or De-Lovely or Sky Captain: bombs, bombs, and more bombs.
 
6) If you do want to risk producing a period film, make sure it has a supernatural subject: the three old-time pictures that succeeded were the marital arts epic Hero, the gothic monster movie Van Helsing and The Passion of the Christ.
 
7) And finally: if you want to produce a money-making political film, make sure it is ideologically unambiguous. Fahrenheit 9/11 was a huge hit. The Manchurian Candidate, with its complicated politics, and Team America , which made fun of both left and right, were not.

About Kurt Andersen

Email Kurt Andersen

Commentary Archives