Movies As Cultural Objects
The cultural diamond, developed by Wendy Griswold, is a way to understand cultural objects. Take movies as an example. The movie itself is a cultural object; receivers are the audience (critics and spectators); the social world is Hollywood; lastly the creator is the director of the movie. How does the cultural diamond dictate the outcome of a movie?
When a director makes a movie, they consider risk minimisation strategies:
- Rely on conventions. Genres in movies have different conventions that repeatedly succeed. Horror movies typically have one not-so-bright character that goes towards the danger instead of running away. This Geico commercial sums up the convention well.
- Imitation. When a movie succeeds, often it is copied, such as A Star is Born, or followed by a sequel, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.
- Reputation. Actors and actresses that are famous are more likely to be casted in other films because they already have a fan base that will bring an audience.
- Secondary market. Apart from the Box Office Return, movies make profits from selling to Netflix, airplane lines and even by producing toys. This is a way to repurpose the cultural object, the movie.
- Overproduction and blockbusters. There’s an overproduction of movies because blockbusters create a stable environment for the movie industry. If a company, take Disney as an example, wanted to produce a movie that doesn’t follow normal conventions and at the same time have a Marvel film being released, they can do so comfortably because it’s known there’s a blockbuster set up to bring in revenue.
One can assume when a creator follows these strategies, the movie will be passed by Hollywood and accepted by the receivers. However, there is a wide range of Box Office revenue and movie metacritic scores. What is and who decides a metacritic score?
Merriam-Webster defines “box office” as “income from ticket sales (as for a film)”. A Metacritic score comes from the website that collects at least 15 publications of critics on a movie and generates an average point score (0–100) where 81+ points is a “must-see”.
Above is a depiction of movies from 2000–2009 and their relationship between box office returns and metacritic score. Why do some movies earn more Box Office returns than others? One outlier in particular is shown in the upper right corner of the graph: Avatar. A film about a sci-fi world colliding with the real world earned $754 million USD and an 83 metacritic score when it came out in 2009.
James Cameron, director and producer of Avatar, casted Sam Worthington who in 2008 was in Rogue Unrated which scored 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, thus there was good reputation.
The Matrix (1999), has a similar plot as Avatar where the main character is involved in a computer/technological role within a war which both imitates and rely on conventions in the sci-fi action genre.
Disney, a stable movie production company, was able to produce Avatar because they didn’t have to worry about the cost of overproduction or if it would be a blockbuster.
Mattel helped create a secondary market by importing Avatar toys. What influence do these risk minimisation strategies have on a metacritic score?
Avatar scored 83 points on Metacritic, two points higher than the cut off to being a “must-see” film. After following all of the steps in risk minimisation, the film barely passed the standard, yet earned millions more than other better scoring movies. Maybe this occurred because there were only five other movies with big fan bases that came out in the same year but in different months. Avatar was released in December six days before Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr., Up was shown in theatres in May, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen came out in June, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs got released in July. Another component could be that not many CGI films were being released; the hype about Avatar demanded higher attention.
The cultural diamond dictates the outcome of a movie because the interaction between cultural objects and social world, creators, and receivers is intricate. Specifically, timing can be what most heavily impacts the outcome. People are incredibly unpredictable, so the expression “all hits are flukes” is accurate because no one is ever certain if the movie will succeed. After following risk minimisation, events in life can impact the receivers’ perception on the cultural object, and the social world can tell the creator, “Wow, this will be great” or “Jeez, I don’t know how this didn’t succeed, you did all the steps- it’s not your fault.”
