Why film audiences have given Ben Affleck the flick

When moviemakers get everything right, it’s almost a guarantee that they’ve made a flop, says Rob Long

Ben Affleck in Live by Night (Claire Folger/Warner Bros Entertainment via AP)

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When moviemakers get everything right, it’s almost a guarantee that they’ve made a flop

‘Let me tell you something,” a very successful Hollywood producer once barked at me over a lunchtime chopped salad, “a hit movie or television show represents a mistake somewhere in the system.”

What he meant, I suppose, is that Hollywood produces, by an overwhelming margin, lack­lustre productions and outright failures. Of the hundreds of television series produced in one year, only a handful will go on to a profitable future. In feature films, the ratio is much the same. So when a project somehow breaks through the bottleneck – market research, studio and network interference, and endless demands by the paymasters and mandarins for reshoots and rewrites and recasting – and develops into an outright success, it’s hard not to see it as some kind of malfunction in a system designed to produce disasters.

The processes an organisation has in place, goes the business axiom, are perfectly designed to produce the results that they do. This is a hard idea to truly embrace. We like to think that it’s our failures that are anomalies and our successes that truly represent a healthy and working system, but it’s a good idea every now and then to stop and consider if it’s not the other way around.

It certainly is in Hollywood. Last weekend, three hugely expensive feature films were released into cinemas to a resounding thud. One, a long-time passion project by one of the greatest directors alive, Martin Scorsese, barely made a ripple. Another, starring a certified box­-office star, Ben Affleck, was greeted with yawns and indifference. The third, a family film that was designed to appeal to all ages ended up appealing to no one.

Movie studios and entertainment industry watchers had ready-made explanations for this: it’s a tough time of the year for movies, the weather keeps audiences at home, children are back in school after the winter holiday and everyone is back at work, or audiences are busy catching up on Oscar contenders from the previous year. But all of these excuses ring hollow. The reason these movies failed is because the processes in place were designed to produce that result.

Before a movie is made, it’s forced to cross several hurdles. Before a dollar is spent, most movies face a checklist of (almost) impossible requirements. Does it have a recognisable star involved? It is helmed by a strong director with a clear point of view? Does it tell a story that’s original and fresh but also familiar to audiences? And finally, is there a moviegoing public out there that’s receptive to this kind of film?

In the case of the trio of last weekend's box-office duds, the answer to all of those questions was an emphatic "yes". Martin Scorsese's Silence is an historical drama with clear appeal to religious viewers and features two of the hottest young actors around, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver. But the picture fizzled. Garfield and Driver's representatives no doubt spent the early part of this week reminding everyone that the movie is a "Martin Scorsese picture" and so its failure is not a reflection of their clients' respective value at the box office. And Scorsese's representatives probably spent most of Monday and Tuesday telling everyone that the problems with the movie could be blamed on the casting.

The Ben Affleck movie, Live by Night is a gangster movie set in the 1920s, directed by and starring Affleck, is a more complicated situation. It's hard to blame the casting or direction when both involve the same person. And Paramount Pictures surely predicted that its major disaster this weekend, Monster Trucks, would appeal to children and adults alike with its unusual blending of animation and live-action storytelling. All three projects reflect at least a year's worth of thoughtful and strategic decision-making by some of the most experienced and accomplished players in the entertainment business.

We’ve all had the experience of sitting in a cinema watching the trailers and knowing, deep in our bones, which movies are going to catch fire and which are going to flame out. I remember sitting in a Los Angeles cinema, surrounded on all sides by an industry-savvy audience, and after one particularly unpromising trailer hearing someone utter: “Not going to work.”

The audience laughed. There was just something in that four­minute preview that revealed just how awful that picture was, despite the dozens and dozens of sophisticated and talented marketing brains who carefully and painstakingly assembled a trailer designed to cover up the stupidity and predictability of the movie.

The system, after all, is designed to produce movies that meet certain requirements, but no one yet has developed a system for making "good" movies (whatever that means) or financially successful ones. After all, the most popular movie in the United States now is Hidden Figures, a feel-good drama about a trio of African-American female mathematicians who were instrumental to the Nasa space programme, which sounds like the most unlikely description of a hit movie ever conceived. Hidden Figures hits very few of the elemental requirements for a movie to get produced, which is why its success is unrepeatable.

The system is designed to produce Monster Trucks. The hit film, Hidden Figures, is a mistake.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl