Why did Cowboys & Aliens fail to light the box-office on fire this weekend? Sure, it sold more tickets than The Smurfs, which is neck-and-neck with Jon Favreau’s genre stew thanks to 3D, but it still fell well short of expectations for a film budgeted north of $163 million.
One site is already asking “Do People Still Care about Westerns?” which is sort of a silly question if you ask me with Paramount scoring twice with Westerns in the last eight months with Rango ($123 million) and Best Picture nominee True Grit ($171 million). Rango‘s success recently continued onto Blu-ray where it held the #1 sales position for the last two weeks in a row. So I don’t think it’s a matter of whether audiences still care about Westerns, but I do believe they need to look at a movie and see something worth anticipating.
If you’re going to try and sell an audience on the idea of a genre mash-up such as Cowboys & Aliens you have got to deliver more than just the norm. Yeah, the title may be unique, but if the film itself can’t live up to that title what good is it? Cowboys & Aliens did not differentiate itself from anything we’ve seen over the last few years, despite the fact it attempted to mash together two genres that couldn’t be farther apart; the slow and methodical Western with its short bursts of action and gunfire and the slick, effects-blazoned light show of an alien invasion feature. The prospect of such a film, should it deliver, is definitely enticing… should it deliver.
In my review of the film I wrote the following paragraph, initiating a response from a reader, which is actually the reason I’m writing this article:
Equally distracting are the aliens, which now feel commonplace. Maybe that’s because of how many alien films we’ve seen lately. In just the last six months we’ve seen aliens with numbers, aliens stealing our mothers and alien robots trashing Chicago. On top of that there have been aliens hitchhiking with Comic Con geeks, destroying Los Angeles, homaging Steven Spielberg, attacking South London and delivering green magic rings. There comes a point when the magic wears off and Cowboys & Aliens happens to arrive at the tail end of this run and these aliens don’t do enough to differentiate themselves.
In response to this, a reader by the name of “Rick” replied:
First is that fair to criticize Cowboys and Aliens because they come last. Ants or Bugs life? [Armageddon] or Deep Impact? Studios fight for whats popular. Right now you are rewarding Star Trek for delaying, but Cowboys & Aliens, you snooze you lose. guess you should of shown up in may. what if a bunch of space movies come out right before star trek 2? Are you going to dock ST2 because its a space movie and your bored of that genre?
I’m just trying to understand, what rules you have about reviewing movies. If a screaming kid is in your theater are you going to dock it? How many outside elements do you allow?
I explained to “Rick” this wasn’t a rule I was operating under, but more of a theory as to why I found the aliens in the film so boring. I mean, these are aliens attacking cowboys in the 1800s, I shouldn’t feel as if the film and the characters in it are accepting this as normal. In my review I suggested director Jon Favreau should have tried to imagine how Clint Eastwood’s Bill Munny would have reacted had aliens suddenly showed up in Unforgiven or how John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards would have reacted if his young niece had been captured by aliens instead of Native Americans in The Searchers.
The question is, however, would I have been as bored with these alien invaders had films such as I Am Number 4, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Paul, Battle: Los Angeles, Super 8 and others hadn’t already hit theaters this year? Have I become desensitized to the idea of just another CG alien attack on unsuspecting humans, or was it the presentation of said aliens that was the problem?
As “Rick” pointed out, there have been other instances in the past where films with similarly themed stories were released around the same time, albeit not on the scale of the recent cinematic alien infestation.
Within three months of one another Deep Impact and Armageddon squared off in 1998. Antz and A Bug’s Life were also released that same year and Volcano and Dante’s Peak faced off a year earlier. In 2004 Warner Bros. beat Baz Luhrmann to the story of Alexander the Great and Oliver Stone’s version of the story was made first. Luhrmann had lined up Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicole Kidman for his version but it never ended up seeing the light of day despite large amounts of pre-production work.
More recently we saw the release of two “sex without emotional attachment” movies, beginning with No Strings Attached and ending more recently with Friends with Benefits, the latter of which isn’t too far behind the first at the box-office, but should be well ahead of it considering it’s a much better movie. And next year we’ll see the exact same character on screen in two different movies as Snow White takes the stage in March with Lily Collins in the lead role in The Brothers Grimm: Snow White and then three months later Kristen Stewart will play the role in Snow White and the Huntsman. Granted, Stewart looks more like Joan of Arc in Snow White and the Huntsman than the fairy tale appearance of Lily Collins version, but will the idea of the same character, twice in such a short timespan, turn people off?
Fatigue at the cinema isn’t a new idea. People have been talking about superhero fatigue for the past few years and this summer was no different. Kevin recently questioned whether we may be getting close to sci-fi fatigue and perhaps that was part of my Cowboys & Aliens theory. Is it possible it’s not the Western aspect of Cowboys that kept audiences away, but the sci-fi aspect that didn’t crank their dial?
“Rick” suggested I should maybe explore a top ten list of circumstances that may lead to a theoretical fatigue when it comes to new releases. I didn’t think a top ten would necessarily work, but on top of what I’ve already mentioned I’d say too much of one actor could definitely be another. For example, Natalie Portman was recently seen in four movies back-to-back-to-back-to-back (six if you count indies like Hesher and The Other Woman) from Black Swan to Thor and there were comments popping up here and there about Natalie overload. I remember experiencing the same thing with Ben Stiller back in 2004 when he was in six mainstream features.
You could point to the Matrix style of fight scene shooting with “Bullet time” which could be seen in damn near every action movie for a few years. Paul Greengrass’ handheld approach to fight scenes in The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum definitely had a big impact on action films that followed and is one of reasons people were dissatisfied with Marc Forster’s Quantum of Solace.
The horror genre has had its share over the years and is probably one of the worst offenders. More recently it was the rise and fall of the “torture porn” style of films and now it has become the found footage phenomenon.
Too much of a good thing is an often-used phrase for a reason, and the world of movies is one place where not knowing when enough is enough is part of every day business.
