It’s a tale of two movie franchises.
“Fast Five” [insert your preferred racing pun here] with $83 million over the weekend. Some sequels earn a fraction of their predecessor’s take. The “Furious” films just keep raking in more cash each time around.
Meanwhile, the “Scream” series continues to sputter at the box office. “Scream 4″ fell to 13th place, dropping a significant 69 percent from the previous weekend.
But box office figures only tell part of the story. The “Furious” films may be clunky and illogical, but you don’t feel cheated when you leave the theater. Compare that to “Scream 4,” a perfunctory sequel which only die-hards will insist merits another installment.
So what’s the biggest difference between the two?
It comes down to visual energy. Director Justin Lin, who has overseen the last three installments, continues to find new and exciting ways to shoot cars careening across the screen. It’s that simple. He’s no auteur, but he’s getting better at the part of the craft that interests him – storming our pleasure centers.
Director Wes Craven, the maestro pulling the “Scream” strings, is on an opposite path. There’s very little that’s new or inventive in the fading franchise. Craven delivers the pabulum with a craftsman’s touch. There’s little about the newest “Scream” that’s less than professional. But where’s the joy, the sense of discovery that powered the first film?
And, most of all, where did the signature scares go, like the sight of Drew Barrymore slowly losing her cool in the first film’s opening moments?
The best segments in “Scream 4″ deal with the bickering team of David Arquette and Courteney Cox, their on-screen courtship mirroring their real-life strife in oddly compelling ways. But they’re relegated to bench players when the killer starts targeting the newer, younger cast members.
Big mistake.
Some film franchises defy the inevitable sequel math. The “Harry Potter” films thrive because they fall back on those wonderfully inventive books by J.K. Rowling. And the James Bond films often soar when a new actor or director joins the franchise.
The “Furious” films don’t need new blood. They seem to find new ways to entertain us without shaking the formula like an Etch-a-Sketch (or Polaroid photograph to go slightly older school).
Meanwhile, “Scream 4″ is nothing but verbal formula, and the words don’t add up to much. How many times can you go to the meta well?
The “Furious” films pump up the eye candy, a far better way of extending a franchise than relying on genre cliches.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
How many times can you go to the meta well? I don’t know, snarking about tropes is pretty much Joss Whedon’s whole act and people still aren’t tired of it (maybe they have a thing for plots an eighth grader would write if he was trying to be “edgy”).
But it might not be fair to compare a horror film to an action film; more than two Nightmares on Elm Street or Fridays the 13th is really fairly pointless, but I have no problem with all 6 Rockies or all 4 Die Hards or all 26 (yes, really) Zatoichi films (the one Beat Takeshi made is an abomination, though). It’s a lot easier to deaden the “finding this scary” sense than the “boy that’s a cool swordfight/gunfight/carchase/explosion” sense.
I was happy to see a new Scream coming out with the old cast. I was, however, disappointed for the very reason you stated. Why were the stars, Arquette, Cox, and Campbell, given such weak parts? Who cares about all the younger stars? No one. They wanted to see more of the old characters involved in the story vs. having them fill in holes. Craven tried to add new blood, but he forgot what makes those flicks interesting.
Except that his last two TV series both got cancelled pretty quickly…
Yes, but “Whedon got robbed by teh evul network sootz” is the default explanation for Dollhouse and Firefly being cancelled. I dare you to go on any average media site, and say that the reason either got cancelled is that it is bad—it’s easier with Dollhouse, but just try it with Firefly, if you enjoy being flamed.
Admittedly, Dollhouse did largely dispense with snark, leaving Whedon to fall back on the only other weapon in his arsenal, over-the-top melodrama. Thus, even Whedonites can be found admitting it’s not very good.
That’s true, but it’s pretty clear that fanboys on the internet don’t reflect the tastes of the general public, and there aren’t really enough of them to make a hit of a ‘geek’ property without wider appeal. Joss Whedon’s post-Buffy career has been proof of that.
I actually liked Firefly, but I could never get behind the idea that it could have been a mainstream hit if Fox had treated it better. It was always going to be a limited-appeal show. Dollhouse started off pretty abysmal then got much better, but never really reached farther than the lower reaches of ‘good’. It might have been better off as a mini-series on the Syfy channel, especially as they essentially made the ‘final’ episode at the end of the first season.