It's the genre that should have enjoyed a stellar year, given the World Cup and effects of the recession, but Hollywood's romantic efforts failed miserably, writes DECLAN BURKE
BASED ON Margaret Mitchell's bestselling novel, and released in 1939 with the US still reeling from the Great Depression and as the world lurched towards war, Gone With the Windwas lavish escapism on an epic scale, all wrapped around the romantic follies of Rhett Butler and the imperishable Scarlett O'Hara. Adjusting for inflation, Gone With the Windremains the biggest box-office smash of all time, with $1.6 billion to its credit.
Given that 2010 was a World Cup year, and one in which the realities of the latest economic depression began to bite hard, romantic movies must have seemed a safe bet for Hollywood. The presumption, of course, being that women are the core demographic for romance flicks, they don’t watch football, and that we’re all in dire need of some quality escapism and improbably happy endings.
This year Hollywood offered romance-and-vampires ( The Twilight Saga: Eclipse), gosh-I'm-already-pregnant romance ( The Back-Up Plan, The Switch), epistolary romance ( Dear John, Letters to Juliet), backpack romance ( Eat Pray Love, When in Rome), multiple-character romance ( Valentine's Day), doomed-teen romance ( Remember Me), holiday romance ( The Last Song), and even a whimsical Oirish romance ( Leap Year).
Some fared better than others at the box office. Eclipse, for example, was the fourth highest earner the US box-office charts this year, with an impressive $300 million. The multi-star vehicle Valentine's Daybrought in $110 million, Dear Johngenerated $80 million, and the Julia Roberts movie Eat Pray Lovealso took in $80 million.
The bottom line of box office returns don't tell the full story, of course. Letters to Julietcost roughly $30 million to make, and brought in $53 million, which isn't a bad return on investment. The Jennifer Lopez vehicle The Back-Up Plan, on the other hand, cost $35 million to make, and has barely earned $37 million. Remember Me, which arrived on a wave of hype given that it starred the Twilight Saga's Robert Pattinson, earned $19 million after costing $15 million to make.
All of which is very small beer when compared with this year's top three performers in the US: Toy Story 3($415 million), Alice in Wonderland($334 million) and Iron Man 2($312 million).
It’s possible to argue, of course, that there were mitigating factors undermining the romance film this year. For starters, the sheer weight of numbers may have told against each film, as the potential audiences began to suffer from romance fatigue. There is, after all, only so many times you can watch Amanda Seyfried’s blank features miserably fail to register anything remotely approaching a plausible emotion.
It’s possible that Hollywood, having singularly failed to make even one decent soccer film over the past 100 years or so, hugely underestimated the domestic appeal (to women and otherwise) of a World Cup in which Team USA had the audacity to draw with England and generally comport themselves with equal amounts skill, pluck and dignity.
So much for quantity, then; what of the quality? Rotten Tomatoes collates US critical opinion and offers a percentage mark for each film released. Of the top 12 romance flicks released this year, only four received a passing grade of more than 40 per cent. If we remove Eclipse (52 per cent) from the list, on the basis that it’s the third offering in a franchise based on a bestselling series of novels, the grade averages out at 29 per cent.
But if the romance movie underperformed as a genre when it came to putting bums on seats, it's unfair to blame the audience. Dear John, which combined the thespian might of Amanda Seyfried and Tatum Channing, garnered only 28 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes but earned $80 million at the box office. The Last Song, starring teen singing sensation Miley Cyrus, scraped 19 per cent and still brought home $63 million.
The appetite for romance is certainly out there – both Dear Johnand The Last Song, for example, are based on bestselling romance novels by Nicholas Sparks. And before you suggest that today's moviegoing audience has grown too cynical for the reductive pieties of the three-act romance, it's worth bearing in mind there was nothing naive about Rhett and Scarlett's relationship. Meanwhile, the Twilight Sagacouldn't be less complex were the romance between single-celled amoebae.
The failure of contemporary romantic films lies squarely with makers. Perhaps the rise of gross-out romantic comedy, fantasy epics and the current predilection for torture porn has led producers, writers and directors to suffer a crisis of faith, an inability to trust in the simple, time-honoured magic of boy-meets-girl.
That’s the generous view. The other is that (the largely male) movie makers are simply taking their (largely female) audience for granted, and that it’s Hollywood who no longer gives a damn.
