Roger L. Simon has some thoughts on the Brian Anderson essay on the decline of Hollywood that we linked to yesterday. Roger reminds us that it’s not just politics have caused the precipitous decline in Hollywood’s revenues.
Roger writes:
No, the problems for Hollywood are deeper than politics and the production of more movies like Spiderman II (a good programmer which Anderson makes sound like the second-coming of Lawrence of Arabia) is not about to solve them.
I doubt seriously that Brian thinks that Spider-Man II is in the same league with the magisterial Lawrence. (For a more apt pairing, I compared the first Spider-Man movie in in 2002 to the original Star Wars of 1977). On the other hand, unlike the year that Lawrence debuted, there certainly were few other films worth seeing the summer that it played the googleplexes in the shopping malls. And even fewer with as positive–and potent–a message.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member