Over the weekend, I attended 4 screenings at a Women in Cinema festival. While walking to the theater, I also listened to a bunch of neglected podcasts, and ran into 2 separate ones that discussed the niche marketing of film. These are not mutually exclusive.
The first podcast I listened to that mentioned the niche market was the Nerdist Podcast discussing the modern state of filmmaking with Kevin Smith, who was promoting his niche market film Tusk. Smith and Hardwicke were discussing how studios look at Social Media followings, and add that into their decisions. They look at Twitter fans, followers on Facebook, Instagram, etc, and weigh those with their decisions to hire you or to make your movie. This is because having followers has already created a niche market with built in fans. When casting sends resumes, they now send those numbers along with your list of credits and education.
Smith and Hardwicke bantered back and forth on how this following was free marketing, and how it fed into the current trend of niche marketing. They commented that filmmaking is now either very low budget or very high budget because the only movies that make any money are the ones that make shitloads of money, and the ones that flop bomb hard. Tusk is indicative of this trend. This weekend, a generic but meh movie like The Maze Runner easily beat out an original, but supposedly terrible, movie like Tusk, which only made $885k this weekend. People are shocked by this, but Tusk made more than The Human Centipede (First Sequence) and The Human Centipede (Second Sequence) combined worldwide.
The second podcast to mention niche marketing was Bret Easton Ellis talking to Rob Zombie (9/2/14), where they discussed the niche film market in very negative terms. Ellis lamented that the top ten movies were movies essentially made for children, and that there was little room for movies made for adults. It should be noted that, of the movies this year, the first adult drama falls at #21 with Noah. Zombie commented that since the DVD market had “bottomed out”1, and the rental agreements aren’t what they used to be, that studios are now saying it’s an all or nothing deal. Ellis, in a typically cynical fashion, commented that we shouldn’t really lament the state of the cinema because there’s no turning back.
In essence, the current studio line is that they don’t like funding a bunch of smaller films because the American audience has niche’d itself too far to be reliably profitable. The black films get delegated to black theaters, and largely it is black audiences who will go see them. The horror geek films are the only ones who see the horror films.2 The Burners will see the Burning Man movies, the politicos will see the political movies, etc etc. The only niche that is truly large enough to sustain a decent box office return are the Christians.
Here is where the nerds and geeks come in and say, “what about us?” Honeys, please. The geeks have taken over the asylum. 5 of the top 10 this year are comic book movies, 2 more are reboots of old cheesy sci-fi movie series, and 1 is based on Lego. You’re not niche anymore. You’re the fucking trend. Deal with it.
But, what this comes down to is both a increased homogenization of mainstream culture, as well as an unwillingness to experience somebody else’s life. The niche markets have sent things that aren’t “universal” – meaning: hetero, white, christian – fighting for an ever shrinking percentage of the dollar.
At the Women in Cinema festival, I experienced a breadth of film I didn’t expect. I saw an enthralling documentary about a hetero white christian who was also a poor Vietnam veteran biker who had married a Korean and then a Mexican (the upcoming Stray Dog). I saw a movie about a hetero white punk rock mother stranded in suburbia who connects with a high schooler (Kelly & Cal). I saw a documentary about a hetero white Vietnam veteran who picked mushrooms with an immigrant from Laos (The Last Season). I saw a short doc on live but unexploded bombs in Cambodia buried underground leftover from Vietnam that still go off at random times and hurt people. Another short doc on the life of underage illegal immigrant Mexicans. A short animation about American internment camps. Afghani girls learning to drive. A gay man mourning his lover on their anniversary.
The screenings I was in were underattended, in part due to heavy competition from other screenings, like The Big Lebowski dissection just a couple blocks over, in part due to football season, and in part due to it being the last gasp of summer here in Seattle. Female-directed movies are considered niche, even though they have a wide breadth of subject matter (also not mentioned were films about Filipino deportation, Latvian hereditary insanity, and overpopulation).
The audience making themselves fit into the niche markets means that people don’t see other cultures. We only see reflections of ourselves and our ideologies. While this doesn’t seem insidious, at first, it leads to the tribalistic tendencies I mentioned in the article about American racial difference last week. The desire to see our sensibilities leads to ONLY seeing our sensibilities which leads to an absence of empathy for people who are different from yourself.
This isn’t to shame anybody out of seeing movies that reflect themselves. Seeing how others deal in your situation is an incredibly important part of education. But, if you see 4 big budget comic book/sci-fi reboots a month, why don’t you try seeing 3 of those, and one of something starring somebody that doesn’t look like you. It doesn’t have to be something with heavy social commentary. Watch the Kevin Hart movie, or the Leguizamo film. Watch The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert or Concussion. Hell, watch Let’s Be Cops or Ride Along and consider yourself mildly broadened. Don’t do this out of guilt. Do this out of curiosity. Do this because you want to know about other people.
The more you explore outside the usual “safe” cinema, the larger chance that we’ll get a wider variety of films in the future.
1Of course, Zombie is buying into the corporate line that the DVD market is bottoming out. While physical disc sales have plummeted, home entertainment is still an $18b industry (down from $22b in 2004…you know, pre-economic crash).
2The only horror movie in the top 50 so far this year is The Purge Anarchy at #30.