Jon Favreau Calls the Summer of 2011 a "Blood Bath"
Posted 11.03.10 by Ryan
Anyone can look at the release schedule for the summer of 2011 and see that it already looks crowded but actor/director Jon Favreau, whose Cowboys and Aliens will open in that time period, has been the first to say so publicly. Favreau told The LA Times that next summer is going to be war.
It’s Omaha Beach, it’s going to be a blood bath. There’s never been a summer like this next summer. It’s going to be bloody [for filmmakers and the studios]. As we were sticking thumb tacks in a calendar we realized that this is going to be looked back upon as Omaha Beach.
Favreau has reason to be nervous, as an unprecedented number of sequels and tentpole movies will open over the summer months. For example, May will see the release of Marvel's comic book adaptation of Thor, the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and the comedy sequel The Hangover 2, to name a few. June will see the opening of the X-Men prequel X-Men: First Class, the fifth Fast and the Furious, Fast Five, director J.J. Abrams' secretive sci-fi movie Super 8, and the DC superhero adaptation of Green Lantern.
In July, audiences will get to choose between a Transformers sequel (Transformers: Dark of the Moon), the final Harry Potter movie (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two), another Marvel comic book adaptation (Captain America: The First Avenger, and Favreau's Cowboys and Aliens. With so many movies opening in a short span, Favreau says the result will be a "pit fight" at the box office.
There’s not a weekend where there won’t be teeth on the floor. The audience wins but it’s going to be rough for people making these movies. Then there was the big rush to 3D, so you have all of these people fighting for a limited number of screens and to get the 3D done, since most of these are hybrids or conversions, so this is a technology that is still in the relatively early stages and there’s going to be a lot of blood pressures going up in the months ahead.
Favreau says another contributing factor to studios rushing so many movies to the theaters is the diminishing DVD market.
Even if there is a DVD market now, there won’t be in a few years. People will download on a subscription basis, and the industry model that allowed me to make independent films [such as Swingers and Made] and approach the limited theatrical release as a way to market the home-video products, that’s going away as home-video dries up rapidly. Everything soon will be about what you take in at the box office. In the hour-and-a-half and two-hour theater experience, what people are looking for is something big and brash, an event that you can communally share … that’s what people want and everybody in Hollywood is chasing that right now. And I mean everybody.
Next Showing: Cowboys and Aliens opens July 29