#20: in defense of "mid" movies

plane and the gerardaissance

Gerard is playing a commercial airline pilot here!!!!!!!?????

Let me pose a question. When’s the last time you saw a new release that

• had a budget less than $50M

• was not IP or a sequel

• was not a prestige film?

If it weren’t for Gerard Butler’s latest action movie Plane, I’d struggle to answer my own question. The film’s basic premise is “Pilot Brodie Torrance (Butler) makes a risky landing on a war-torn island, only to find that surviving the landing was just the beginning.” Gerard is a commercial pilot, but he’s also an improbably jacked hero who’s going to go above and beyond to ensure that his crew and passengers make it home alive. 

If Plane sounds like a rip off of other disaster-in-air movies like ConAir or Delta Force, that’s because it kind of is. Plane is not trying to be the newest cult classic or reinvent the action genre. The plot borders on formulaic, and a lot of people would probably describe it as a pretty okay film, maybe even below average, mid. Even so, it harkens back to a time when these kinds of 90-minute genre movies were the bread and butter of the industry. Plane stands out against today’s landscape precisely because it’s not ambitious. It’s too polished to be a true b-movie, but it takes its formula, treats it with enough care, then calls it a day against a $25M budget. It asks nothing more of itself, because it’s not here to impress but to entertain. And entertain it does.

Part of the reason it’s hard to see a movie like Plane these days is that the market seems to be squeezing out this kind of mid-tier film. It’s easy to blame IP for sucking up all the money in Hollywood like the bland, enormous vacuum that it is, but Plane is the victim of a bigger vicious cycle. The bottom line is that people don’t watch movies like they did in the 90s. People don’t go to the theater every week, and they certainly don’t go to the theater just to go. People come for specific films that feel special or event-worthy.

This cultural shift plays a large part in the rise of IP dominance. By linking stories together, studios can guarantee a baseline level of investment in a film, increasing the chance that people will go out of their way to see one specific movie. However, this need to “drive people back to theaters” or to give people something to come back for affects more than IP. It has pervaded Hollywood with a sense of desperation, where every movie feels like “more is more”, because it has to justify its theatrical existence. Last year’s Oscar nominees averaged 2 hours and 24 minutes in runtime, not including the heavyweight Babylon, which runs almost three hours. Marvel’s Phase Four averaged 2 hours and 19 minutes, not to mention the latest Guardians of the Galaxy film, which comes in at over 2.5 hours. (Plane, meanwhile, runs at 1 hour and 47 minutes). 

So people go to the movies less. Hollywood makes increasingly long, increasingly complex movies to make the most of the rare times people do come to the theater. This reinforces the idea that movies are events, which require you to carve 3.5 hours and $30 out of your day, thus starting the cycle all over again. It’s a chicken-egg problem, but people fundamentally can’t watch what doesn’t get made, which gives the studios an outsized responsibility to not simply respond to the market but to actively shape it. Writing-off the entire market for movies like Plane - which made back its budget 2x - will only choke any potential in its cradle.

And if that market for low-ish budget, non-IP filmmaking doesn’t exist, consider the losses. In a world without that market, does Tony Scott become successful? Does John Carpenter become a household name? Does Nora Ephron get to make the movies she does? I’m not saying that genius filmmakers need to cut their teeth on mid-budget B-movies to become greats (although that may be true to some degree). What I’m saying is that if Hollywood doesn’t even have the space for mid-budget genre movies, there’s no chance for anything or anyone to transcend their trappings and become something else entirely, as Top Gun, The Thing, and When Harry Met Sally all do.

That’s the long-game argument, but I think there’s a short-term argument too. Movies like Plane, regardless of whether they become classics or not (Plane almost certainly won’t), are justified because they are good, simple entertainment. Plane is proof that you can tell a compelling story in under two hours and that basic screenplay structures still work. Not every movie has to win an Oscar or be Disney-backed to even be allowed to exist, and if those are the standards by which we choose to judge, Plane will always be judged a bad movie. But on the standard of pure entertainment, Plane is a good movie, not a great one. And that’s enough. 

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A sidebar on Gerard Butler

Longtime readers will know that my loyalty to Gerard Butler runs deep. Ever since seeing The Phantom of the Opera (2004) at an impressionable young age, I’ve been invested in Butler, who has since made a career of playing gritty men who have let themselves go (Den of Thieves anyone?). 

the beginning of my lifelong commitment to gerard butler

It is this newsletter’s official position that Plane marks the beginning of a renaissance for Gerard Butler’s career. Gerard has a second feature in 2023 via Kandahar, which comes out on May 26th. I truly know so little about this movie, but I’ll be doing my part for the GERARDAISSANCE and seeing it in theaters— I hope you’ll do the same! 

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Culture Crumbs

• All content about Taylor Swift and M*** H**** is blocked, blocked, blocked. Do not send it to me, do not tell me about it, do not pass go

• This brief but wonderful New Yorker piece by Alan Shayne about Marlon Brando, which tells me that I would never survive the embarrassment of being an actor 

  

• For those in New York, I’ve only recently made it to the Metrograph, a LES independent theater that has cool film events/screenings and is just a generally beautiful building (with a bar!)

• Yves Saint Laurent dominated the Cannes red carpet with global ambassador Rosé debuting some baby bangs

  

  this is an amazing look but i’m begging hollywood, get zendaya on the red carpet too!!!

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That’s all for this issue! Thank you for reading!