A-List: Carte Blanche Movies
By Josh Spiegel
July 15, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
This week’s A-List looks at five major carte blanche movies from the past 15 years. Carte blanche movies are the ones that guarantee a director whatever they want, the ones that make it so you can do whatever you want with your goodwill. Some people, like Gibson, make mistakes in their personal lives and lose their carte blanche status. Some people use their carte blanche status to make movies that are so personal, so self-involved that no one wants to see them, and studios are hard-pressed to give the directors any money for anything, ever again. A few of these movies are pretty obvious, and one of them is directly inspired by this week’s big release in theaters. Either way, the directors of these movies still have carte blanche. Do they deserve it? Let’s find out.
The Dark Knight
How could this movie not be on the list? Before 2008, Christopher Nolan was regarded as an exciting visual director, one who could put his personal stamp on remakes of Swedish cop thrillers, adaptations of books about dueling magicians, and reboot the Batman series with at least one good movie. And then The Dark Knight changed things. Again, Nolan’s career had been full of movies that were, at the least, very, very good. But The Dark Knight helped move Nolan into the carte blanche category. Though he didn’t get any Oscar nominations, it’s hard to argue with one billion dollars worldwide. Unlike some of the other directors on this list, Nolan has used his status as the guy who could get anything made to make a passion project that could also be incredibly awesome.
Yes, readers, I’m of course talking about Inception, the highly anticipated release that comes out this week (something I’ve been talking about in the A-List for somewhere around eight billion years) to loads of fanfare. There have been some early reviews, and they’re all somewhere around the neighborhood of rapturous. The cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Ken Watanabe, is to die for. The visuals remain vague yet jaw-dropping, and so on. Nolan had been working on the script for years, but was able to crack it later in his career, with money behind him. We can only hope that Inception is as awesome as it looks, but Nolan’s not likely to squander the goodwill engendered by The Dark Knight, a critically acclaimed, commercially beloved masterpiece that hasn’t lost its intense spark two years after the fact.
Ocean’s Eleven
Steven Soderbergh is one of the most interesting and challenging American filmmakers working today. That he continues to work so steadily, with such odd and financially unsuccessful films as Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience, Che, and Full Frontal having come out in the past ten years, would be baffling if it weren’t for his mostly confident, cool, and singular forays into studio filmmaking. Before December 2001, when his remake of Ocean’s Eleven, starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon, among others, was released, Soderbergh had hit it big at the Oscars, getting two Best Director nominations in the same year, for Erin Brockovich and Traffic, and won, too. But it was the third successful film he made, the one after those two, that guaranteed he could do whatever he wanted. The combination of Soderbergh in studio mode, a remake of a barely remembered heist film, and a huge cast was what did it for the man.
Even more than Traffic or Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven managed to combine plenty of stylish and flashy camera tricks (all employed by the director himself, who is also the cinematographer), dry humor, and crowd-pleasing action and entertainment. What’s more, aside from the other two films in the trilogy (which also grossed over $100 million each), Soderbergh has mostly avoided studio projects. Since 2001, excluding the Ocean’s films, the highest-grossing movie of his was last year’s The Informant!, which only made $33 million at the box office (and is well worth watching). Still, his vision hasn’t been compromised as it was when he made little-seen indies after his debut film, sex, lies, and videotape. He may not make lots of successful movies anymore, but with big actors willing to work with him, his low budgets, and fervent fan base, Steven Soderbergh can do pretty much anything.
Finding Nemo
I know what you’re thinking. How could a Pixar movie, let alone any Pixar movie after their first, be a carte blanche movie? It’s worth remembering the stories that surrounded the production of Finding Nemo. This 2003 classic was released during the height of the contentious discussions between the Walt Disney Company and Pixar Animation Studios, when there was even the remotest possibility of a Toy Story 3 that was made outside of Pixar (a nightmare that has long since been averted, but still a scary thought). What’s more, the man at the head of Disney at the time, Michael Eisner, thought that Finding Nemo was going to be the one. Yes, he thought Finding Nemo was going to be the first movie that would prove that Pixar Animation Studios was, in essence, human. He thought it would suck. He thought it would fail. Andrew Stanton, who had put so much into the movie, would fall, as the man behind the story.
Putting it mildly, Michael Eisner was wrong. By the time you’re reading this, Finding Nemo is no longer the highest-grossing Pixar film ever made, but with $339 million in the bank domestically, it took the third film in the Toy Story franchise (and in 3-D, too) to top this fishy tale. Finding Nemo was further proof that people like Andrew Stanton may make some mistakes (another famous story about the film’s production is that another great actor who’ll go nameless here had performed as Marlin, but didn’t work out as the lead), but they know what they’re doing. Stanton is now working on the first live-action film from Pixar, John Carter from Mars, and he’s still sizzling off the success of WALL-E. But Finding Nemo was the movie that proved this guy doesn’t get questioned; he gets what he wants, and rightfully so.
Titanic
The issue is that we don’t learn. There was no good reason to think that Titanic would fail. Yes, it was a big movie, but it was hearkening back to the days when epic romances were the norm, not the outliers. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet weren’t wildly famous, but they were young, pretty, and good enough actors for the material. And also, the film’s writer and director, James Cameron, didn’t make unsuccessful films. His two Terminator films were both hits, the second one being one of the biggest and most influential action films ever. Aliens, True Lies…we’re talking about some big, big movies here. And Titanic, at the time, was the biggest of them all. A movie making anywhere more than $500 million was unheard of in 1997, and is still pretty rare these days, as only three movies have gotten that much money.
One of the others is, of course, The Dark Knight. The final one is yet another movie that came from James Cameron, yet another movie that people were incredibly skeptical about: Avatar. Avatar is now the highest-grossing film of all time, making $750 million domestically, and nearly $2 billion more everywhere else in the world. And it was made possible, doubting and all, thanks to the wild success of Titanic, the movie that made Cameron the self-proclaimed king of the world. Yes, he waited 12 years between movies, but when you’re working on a movie so full of groundbreaking technology as Avatar, can you blame him? We may not think Avatar is an amazing movie (I’m curious to see how it plays as a Blu-ray without 3D enhancement), but it is a movie that only happens when you have carte blanche in Hollywood.
The Sixth Sense
Yeah, yeah, I know. M. Night Shyamalan? How could he have carte blanche status? Certainly, you think, after The Sixth Sense, it’s not a crazy idea. That movie was written, produced, and directed by a young Indian-American who was hailed as the next Steven Spielberg. It lead to a couple of solidly performing films, one that did well but is disliked, and two out-and-out failures. Oh, and he also directed The Last Airbender, which most people have seen and hated (I wouldn’t know, but word-of-mouth is what it is). Though most people aren’t fans of that movie, it’s still likely going to become Shyamalan’s third highest-grossing film. So the question is: what does M. Night Shyamalan need to do to never make a movie ever again? He’s made the horror film about wind attacking people. He’s made the movie about the mermaid in the apartment. What does he need to do?
There’s no question that Shyamalan is considered something of a joke to fanboys (and it’s really hard to argue that status; just watch his most recent films). That aside, however, he’s attracted a wide swath of actors in his films, from Bruce Willis to Samuel L. Jackson to Sigourney Weaver to Joaquin Phoenix to Paul Giamatti. Someone thinks he’s doing something right. The Last Airbender may end up with an impressive-sounding number (as you read this, it’s probably made about $100 million), but the budget was massive, 3D prices helped the box office, and again, most people who saw the movie hate it. What does Shyamalan need to do to lose his carte blanche status? This one’s a baffling question, but nothing seems to do the trick. This is one carte blanche director who should be working a lot harder to get movies made.