MOLI VIEW™

Among the inevitable signs of summer are the annual wave of popcorn movies and the critical essays that cast them as harbingers of the cultural apocalypse.

This season opens with Iron Man and a New York Times essay by Manohla Dargis that laments the absence of "real women" in movies. As she puts it, "Welcome to the new, post-female American cinema."

Every few years, critics complain about the scarcity of both women in movies and "women's movies" – meaningful, character-driven films, or, I suppose, love stories not written by Judd Apatow. Every year, they're right. And they usually blame this on the stupidity of the American public, the scarcity of female executives in the film business, or the cultural climate of the country. And every year, they're wrong.

I can't compliment the intelligence of the audience that demanded a sequel to Transformers. But at this point the decisions made by major studios have less to do with the tastes of executives than with their responsibility to shareholders to bring in profits. Smarter movies can do good business, but they simply can't bring in as much money as action franchises like Iron Man, which took in over a hundred million dollars this weekend.

Of course, that's only in the U.S. – Iron Man made an additional hundred million abroad. As the international audience becomes more important, studios have an added incentive to make movies that can easily translate overseas. (Who can't understand the appeal of a guy in a metal suit who flies?) Character-driven movies simply don't play as well in other countries – especially because those other countries make those kinds of films themselves.

Previous Page  1  2  Next Page