If this past summer movie season seemed awfully underwhelming, just wait until next year, which promises to be the most blockbuster-crowded ever. You’ve got sequels galore (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Hangover 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Cars 2), four different superhero movies (Thor, Captain America, Green Lantern, X-Men: First Class), and plenty of big-budget question marks (including Super 8, Rise of the Apes, Smurfs 3D). Jon Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens falls into that third, riskiest category, and to judge from Favreau’s new interview with Hero Complex, he’s more than a little freaked out that the glut of tentpole pictures is going to spell doom for everybody.
It’s Omaha Beach, it’s going to be a blood bath. There’s never been a summer like this next summer. It’s going to be bloody [for filmmakers and the studios]. As we were sticking thumb tacks in a calendar we realized that this is going to be looked back upon as Omaha Beach … There’s not a weekend where there won’t be teeth on the floor. The audience wins but it’s going to be rough for people making these movies. Then there was the big rush to 3D, so you have all of these people fighting for a limited number of screens and to get the 3D done, since most of these are hybrids or conversions, so this is a technology that is still in the relatively early stages and there’s going to be a lot of blood pressures going up in the months ahead.
Also, Favreau’s doomsaying extends to the DVD market, which he says will be totally gone in a few years: “People will download on a subscription basis, and the industry model that allowed me to make independent films [such as Swingers and Made] and approach the limited theatrical release as a way to market the home-video products, that’s going away as home-video dries up rapidly.†Fun times … right, guys?
Jon Favreau: Summer 2011 will be a ‘blood bath’ for Hollywood [Hero Complex/LAT]