By Colin Brown
We don’t really know how many feature films will end up being made this year – 50,000 seems to be the best global guess – but what we do know is that their genetic make-up will differ in every instance. “Each film has its own DNA,” observed WME agent Mark Ankner, speaking at a recent panel on film packaging organized by Pepperdine University as part of its certification program for film & TV finance. “No two films are alike,” echoed UTA agent Hailey Wierengo, sitting alongside him. “Each has its own unique set of hurdles.”
What we also know from DNA science is that even something as complex as the human genome – the sum total of all our hereditary information – boils down to four essential building blocks arranged and packaged in a myriad ways. By mapping those arrangements, we can not only pinpoint the individual signatures of our species in all its glorious variation, but also establish some common characteristics that help in making useful working assumptions.
And so it is with cinema: academics may argue all they like about the problems that come with labeling films according to shared storytelling elements and milieus, but genre classification is as good a starting point as any right now for determining a project’s prospects. If that project happens to be a mix-and-match of different genres, as so many are these days, then the commercial realities that come with such hybrids need to be acknowledged too.
At their most forensic, some of those commercial realities can make for uncomfortable reading. In a recent New York Times article, former statistics professor Vincent Bruzzese described how his combination of data analysis and focus groups has led to some of the following blunt conclusions: a cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero; bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle. Bruzzese, who spearheads the Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also makes this bold assertion: “Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned. If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”
