I’d ask why geeks need so much damn validation, but I think we all know the answer to that is ‘because we never got any validation back when we were in high school’ or whatever.
Or is it that we’ve begun to believe the asinine hype that we read in trash magazines and online about how we’ve inherited the earth?
More likely, it’s that geeks (the ones that believe the hype that they’ve inherited the earth) are eager to claim the label of ‘geek’ as something that means ‘just like me and the people who like the same things that I do’ while both completely dismissing other splinters of the ‘demographic’ and vastly overestimating the actual volume of people who align with their definition.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was never going to be this year’s The Dark Knight. It is going to be a modest cult success, which will have a robust life on DVD and will be watched and talked about by its fans for far longer than the people that turned out for The Expendables and Eat Pray Love, and perhaps even for Inception. Scott is, I think, an anti-Inception – a movie that appears to say nothing meaningful at a surface glance, but has something to say (chiefly about how you have to learn to love yourself before you can really love someone else) after analysis. But it also doesn’t have a billion-dollar director attached to it. Nor does it have the cinematic cocktease of a Bruce/Sly/Schwarzenegger three-way.
We live in an echo chamber. We surround ourselves with ourselves to a very great degree, and it’s moments of dissonance like this and Serenity‘s poor box office showing when we see the true shape and size of fandom.
If I were going to venture a post-mortem guess at how Scott‘s opening weekend went the way it did, I’d think it comes down a few disparate factors:
1: The Expendables drew in a ton of male viewers from across the spectrum – from the college age to the 50+ guy who is celebrating the return of his generation’s action icons to the screen. In fact, I’d probably describe most of the Expendables audience as guys who don’t really go to the movies a whole lot. I know that most of the audience during my screening of it fit that bill; there were a lot of people with canes, enough that I remember it. I think the other two major releases from last week cannibalized a bit of the audience that SPvW could have gotten on a quieter weekend.
2: Scott Pilgrim had a pretty inaccessible ad campaign. During an episode of Glee earlier in the summer, Natasha and I and Natasha’s roommate saw a commercial for the movie and I (who have been reading Scott Pilgrim since 2004 – when I was 25*) geeked out a little, Natasha (who had read the first book in the series at that time) was interested, and Natasha’s roommate (who is a little bit of a geek but not a comics geek) watched the spot and went “Wait, what the fuck was that?” and not in a positive, I-need-to-see-more-of-it way.
Every trailer and ad was all about allaying fanboy uncertainty. From that perspective, the campaign seems to have been incredibly successful. But I don’t know that it did a damn thing for anybody who wasn’t already predisposed to go and see it.
3: People are maybe sick of Michael Cera a bit.
4: There is a prevailing opinion that SP is a teen movie, which is probably keeping some twentysomething and thirtysomething adults (the actual audience) from seeing it.
5: Edgar Wright is a great and underrated director. Shaun of the Dead grossed about $30 million at the box office. Hot Fuzz, which was less niche-y, raked in more money, but Scott Pilgrim is an incredibly niche film (a movie adaptation of an indie comic book series full of references to stuff that was popular when the author was in grade school).
6: There’s a statement that I want to attribute to Kevin Feige about the audience’s ability to really suspend disbelief for one major element of a movie. There is a lot of disbelief to suspend in Scott Pilgrim. Really, the movie reminds me a very lot of a musical both in its unreality and its structure (Wright has made this comparison already, saying that characters break into fights in the way characters in musicals break into song). So, Scott Pilgrim shares a space with Moulin Rogue, another excellent movie that didn’t perform all that amazingly at the domestic box office.
Is it okay to be disappointed that a really lovingly adapted, high-quality movie didn’t blow the doors off in its opening weekend? Sure. But the hue and cry about it is deafening from the geek audience. Art is a success if it moves you; the money side of it is an unfortunate byproduct. Be content that Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World is a successful film, no matter how much it grosses.
*Anybody saying that this is not a film for anybody over thirty severely underestimates both how long the material has been around for and how long it has taken to get from start to finish.
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I’ve been meaning to comment on this for a while. I finally have the time to give the subject the thought it deserves.
I think the idea that you can group all “geeks” into one homogeneous grouping is wrong. It is something tyhat is done by Hollywood and the Hollywood media quite a bit. “These comic book movies were successful. This film is adapted from a comic book. Therefore, it will be successful.” This attitude is nothing new. Look at how many bodyswapping comedies there were around when Big came out, or how many self referential horror films came out after Scream, or how many torture porn films came out after Saw. But often times, studios miss the nuances of what made the original films successful because they have tunnelvision one one element of the concept’s popularity.
But amongst the geek universe, there are many different branched of geekdom. Even when it comes to comic book fans, many people who love the X-Men comics wouldn’t give the Scott Pilgrim books the light of day. Same as people who like Love and Rockets, Palookaville and American Splendor wouldn’t give the X-Men or Scott Pilgrim a second glance.
But there is spill over to these fanbases. Instead of think as geekdom as one unified group, Hollywood should think of it as a series of Venn Diagrams. Scott Pilgrim was a graphic novel, yes, but was also a romance, a coming of age story, a tribute to video game culture and martial arts movies that inspired them, and a nod to manga and Asian graphic culture. To present it simply as a frenetic comic book adaptation sold it short and left many of who could be in its target audience out.