It would be easy to point to declining attendance and box office (when adjusted for inflation) over the last thirty years, but also perhaps misleading. The business has changed too much since then – in 1984 there was no internet or original cable programming, no HDTV, and international box office was a fraction of domestic – for a simple numerical comparison to tell us much. Analyzing the changes could easily be several blog posts, and it’s not really what I’m interested in today. Rather, I’d like to compare the two years in terms of how the types of movies studios produce has changed, and what that could mean for screenwriters.
There were, of course, hundreds of movies released in both years. To keep things manageable, I’ll look at the top 25 movies in each year. I’ll stipulate that this sample size risks being skewed by outliers, but I think it should give us some useful points of discussion. Here are the lists, drawn from boxofficemojo.com, with a few notations that I’ll explain in a moment.
2014
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier
- The LEGO Movie (original)
- Transformers: Age of Extinction
- Maleficent (based on)
- X-Men: Days of Future Past
- Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
- The Amazing Spider-Man 2
- Godzilla
- Big Hero 6
- 22 Jump Street (sequel to reboot)
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Interstellar
- How to Train Your Dragon 2
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
- Gone Girl
- Divergent
- Neighbors
- Ride Along
- Rio 2
- Lucy
- The Fault in our Stars
- Mr. Peabody & Sherman (based on)
- 300: Rise of an Empire
1984
- Beverly Hills Cop
- Ghostbusters (sci-fi)
- Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
- Gremlins (sci-fi)
- The Karate Kid
- Police Academy (action comedy)
- Footloose
- Romancing the Stone
- Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
- Splash
- Purple Rain
- Amadeus
- Tightrope
- The Natural
- Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (reboot)
- Revenge of the Nerds
- 2010
- Breakin’
- Bachelor Party
- Red Dawn
- The Terminator
- City Heat
- All of Me (romantic comedy)
- Places in the Heart
- The Killing Fields
I first divided the lists into the source of the idea for the film – original stories, adaptations, sequels, etc. In some cases, I had to make a judgment call. For example, you could argue Purple Rain is based on Prince's album, but I considered it original. And I decided Malificent is based on Sleeping Beauty, though you could make a case that it should be considered a new story. I tried to note the decision I made next to movies where that decision may be questionable. I also categorized sequels that were based on underlying material (such as The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1) simply as sequels, figuring at this point they rely more on the first movie than the source material. Though I did break out sequels to reboots just because I found that interesting. The results are:
2014
- Originals: 6
- Based on: 5
- Sequels: 9
- Reboots: 2
- Sequels to Reboots: 3
1984
- Originals: 18
- Based on: 3
- Sequels: 3
- Reboots: 1
- Sequels to Reboots: 0
I also analyzed genres. I made a couple of decisions to simplify things – I chose to lump thrillers in with action/adventure, though Romancing the Stone is not really the same genre as City Heat. I also lumped science fiction and comic book movies together. And I categorized musical dramas like Purple Rain and Footloose as drama, though there were enough teen oriented music and dance themed films in 1984 they might qualify for their own category. Here are the results:
2014
- Action/Adventure/Thriller: 0
- Sci-fi/Comic Book: 12
- Fantasy: 3
- Broad Comedy: 1
- Romantic Comedy: 0
- Drama: 2
- Animated Family: 5
- Action-Comedy: 2
- Action/Adventure/Thriller: 6
- Sci-fi/Comic Book: 5
- Fantasy: 0
- Broad Comedy: 2
- Romantic Comedy: 2
- Drama: 8
- Animated Family: 0
- Action-Comedy: 2
What does all of this mean for screenwriters? I would conclude that it is going to be hard to interest a studio in an original idea. That poses a challenge if you’re trying to write a spec script and don’t have the resources to option a bestselling book or comic book. One possible solution is to try to find public domain characters to base your work on – Dracula or Santa Claus, for example.
Another thing to think about is that most specs these days might better be considered writing samples. So when you’re weighing your ideas, you might consider whether the anticipated spec will properly demonstrate your ability to adapt the kind of material studios are making.
And of course it looks like writing in the science fiction genre makes more sense than writing comedy or drama.
We could, of course, also just bemoan the lack of original movies and limited variety these days. (I do that a lot.) But that won’t help us very much when it comes to making a living. If you want to be a professional screenwriter, you have to pay attention to market trends.
Of course, considering how bad 2014 was at the box office (down 5.2% from 2013), maybe we should also anticipate a change in course for the studios. One can dream, after all…
Further reading: Here’s an interesting article from Variety about the bad 2014 box office and what may be behind it, plus a clue as to how studios are planning to combat it.
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