We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Somebody spent $200 million to make The Golden Compass, a fantasy epic chock-full of computerized special effects. The movie earned just under $26 million in its first weekend, putting it on track to lose some serious money over its entire run. At least one industry watcher has commented that its poor opening, combined with a crowded roster of opening movies, puts it at risk of being pushed out of theaters entirely before the lucrative Christmas holiday.

The Golden Compass is based on a series of viciously anti-Catholic novels for the Harry Potter audience. Christian groups protested the film on that basis before it was released, but then learned that the filmmakers had anticipated their objections and toned down the anti-religious message. But that message was apparently the heart of the story, and ripping it out left a mangled mess.

At least, that’s one theory. This reviewer for the New York Post thought that the movie still had plenty of anti-religious sentiment and nihilistic atheism that no amount of computer animation could turn into a story:

Sorting all this out yields a clanking allegory (Church bad; secular skepticism good) that sucks all the fun away while much more enticing-looking stuff - fanciful zeppelin docks and mysterious pirate ships - hovers frustratingly in the background, like Christmas toys that go unused while toddlers play with the empty box. Worse, it’s like toddlers ignoring the toys because they’re frowning over Nietzsche and sighing about the will to power and the ascetic ideal.

I just can’t get my head around the magnitude of loss that this film will suffer. Maybe it’ll do better in foreign markets, but the loss looks to be at least several tens of millions of dollars.

Whose dollars were those? I don’t understand how movies are financed, but logically they must have been somebody’s dollars. Somebody put all that money in, and now most of it is likely gone forever.

Who made that decision? Who greenlighted this thing? Some living, breathing human being (probably several) recommended investing $200 million (probably of somebody else’s money) into a movie based on a series of viciously anti-Catholic and aggressively atheistic books. And presumably they did so with the idea that throngs of Americans would pay more than $200 million for the pleasure of watching that story on screen.

I struggle to imagine their thought process. Do they imagine that somewhere in America, hordes of fecund nihilistic atheists yearn to take their many children to a movie that reflects their values? Do these people have any grasp of demographics? Do they somehow believe that the theaters are already saturated with so many pro-Christian, family-values movies that Middle America is exhausted from going to the movies all the time, and so the fresh movie dollars are to be found in the burgeoning fecund atheist audience?

It sounds silly, but remember that this is a $200 million decision. You would think that somebody would have pointed out that the successful fantasy epics of late have been either expressly traditional (Narnia, Lord of the Rings), or neutral on the grand moral issues of our time. Before putting $200 million behind nihilistic atheism, you would think that they could spend a few thousand to run some polls or focus groups and get some reactions from the target children and their parents.

But apparently none of that happened. The money was spent, the movie was made, and now the basic facts of American ideology and demographics have crushed it into the dirt. And still Hollywood resists the lesson. Many of the reviewers featured on Rotten Tomatoes insist that it flopped because it was a bad movie, not because people rejected its message. What those reviewers don’t consider is that it’s a bad movie because the original story was so obviously unpalatable to American audiences that the director and writers had to perform massive emergency surgery on an already-dying patient.

Let’s look on the bright side: They can’t lose money forever. Through whatever bizarre history, decisionmakers in Hollywood are in love with far-left ideas and control hundreds of millions of moviemaking dollars. Remember, somebody owns those dollars that they’re pissing away, even if indirectly as shareholders, just as some poor fools own stock in the New York Times. Some day those people will get tired of being played for suckers to finance “message” movies that Americans will obviously hate. (See also the recent spate of anti-American movies about Iraq and the War on Terror.) Some day the dollars will dry up, and then watch how the moviemakers will wail and gnash their teeth at the unfairness of it all.