From Entertainment Weekly.
both official stage-managed Comic-Con leaks and unofficial long-lens TMZ leaks — is beginning to radically change the way a generation of moviegoers talk about movies. We have become obsessed with pre-release minutiae — casting announcements, plot points, set design. All of this has, I think, taken the focus off the most important thing: The freaking movie.
This is why the blockbuster season of 2011 has felt so particularly uninspired. It’s not that the movies are necessarily worse than they were 10 years ago (although nothing released 10 years ago was even half as bad as Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides). It’s just that very few of the movies were even half as interesting as the chatter that led up to their release. Take, for example, The Hangover Part 2, a film which dominated the news cycle one year ago — remember the Mel Gibson flare-up? Now, the movie was a massive success at the box office. But the only conversation we ever really had about Hangover 2 — and we all had this conversation many, many times — was: “Wow, they really just remade the first one.”
It might sound funny to say this, but the film with the longest cultural tail of summer 2011 didn’t even technically come out in the summer. I’m talking about Fast Five. Yes, it’s a silly film — but for a few weeks in May, it was also the silly film that everyone was talking about it. Part of that can be credited to the film’s surprisingly pitch-perfect over-the-top tone — best exemplified by the sequence when Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson wrestle each other through multiple walls like a pair of shaved grizzly bears. But I would argue a different theory: People were genuinely surprised by Fast Five. It was not a film that had been sold for a year in advance. The film was not at Comic-Con. The trailer did not debut one year in advance. There were no TMZ photos of Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson hanging out off-camera rubbing oil on their biceps, even though God knows that would have torn up the internet.
It is a very interesting article and worth the read.
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