Movies that we need more of (Draft)

Recently in a review of Zombieland by Mike Leon he compared Zombieland to Ghostbusters and said, "we need more movies like Ghostbusters." I agree. I have seen many movies in the past 10 years and I feel like we have lost something. There have been movies that I liked because they were good, movies that I loved because they were bad, but there haven't been any movies as great as great movies of the past. We need more movies like Ghostbusters and Jurrasic Park, we don't need a Ghostbusters remake or a Jurrasic Park 8. If I had to classify the two thousands in film it would be the ten years that Hollywood ran out of ideas and just remade old movies and TV shows.  Oh and sequels, a shit ton of sequels. That's nothing new though, hollywood has been ruining movies with bad sequels for a long time, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, Chinatown, Police Academy, Revenge of the Nerds.

The Bottom has fallen out of the DVD market, and blockbusters aren't making back their huge budgets. I blame this trend on Hollywood forgetting how to make movies.  Over ten years all they have done is increase ticket prices and decrease quality. Movie ticket prices have almost doubled and DVD prices haven't. People stopped going to movies a long time ago because of the price, now they've also stopped buying DVDs because the movies are so bad.

Another problem with modern movies is a formula that is typified by Toy Story and Oceans Eleven, you don't need every damn star in your movie to make it successful.  Even the Coen brothers fell into this trap with Burn After Reading. It was a mildly entertaining movie that would have been much more successful with lesser known actors.  The latest victim of this problem was Funny People. The movie with almost no overhead cost $70 million to make because of all the star power. Needless to say the dark understated comedy did not make it's money back, even though it was well written and a good story.  The reason all of these people who make $15 million dollars a film make that much is because people liked them in better movies fifteen years ago that they got paid a lot less to be in. Good movies have fresh stars that can make roles their own.  Having Tom Cruise play a factory worker, average joe in War of the Worlds or a Nazi general in Valkyrie doesn't work, it's not believable.

Failed formula number two when it comes to wasting all your studio's money are special effects orgies, see Peal Harbor, Day After Tomorrow, AI, War of the Worlds and the upcoming abortion-on-screen 2012. Paying hundreds of millions of dollars isn't really going to make your effects more believable and it's not really the draw that it used to be.  The effects made movies like Independence Day and Jurassic Park because people had never seen it done before, now it's been done, stop it.

You have to spend money to make money, it's true, but you have to spend less money and make more. Hollywood has taken on the Sony Playstation 3 attitude of the more money you spend the more money you will make. Coincidently, or not, this change in Hollywood has coincided with Sony buying up most of the studios and consolidating the movie industry. Stop spending money Sony, you suck at business. And other studios should stop spending money like Sony. I guess this ended up being more about what kind of movies we need less of, but the bottom line is we need more movies that are worth the money it costs to make them, think Ghostbusters, think Jurassic Park, fuck even think X Men. Follow these two rules 1. Make your movie cheap 2. If you can't follow rule #1 give people something new.