Will natural disasters hurt crisis films?
Movies about earthquakes, hurricanes and fires may hit too close to home for some audiences
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/10/2017 (3268 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Cities shook to their core, decimating flood waters, wrecked buildings, families losing homes, rising casualties and an epic onslaught of destruction.
People have either lived through it or watched these events unfold on the news in recent months with powerful hurricanes hitting Puerto Rico, Houston and the southern United States, plus deadly earthquakes in Mexico. So do audiences really want to go see these same scenes play out at their local cinema?
The sci-fi action film Geostorm (in theatres today), starring Gerard Butler, imagines a climate-controlling satellite defence system — installed in space to quell natural disasters — that malfunctions, creating extreme weather conditions with bus-sized hail, gigantic tidal waves and killer tornadoes that threaten Earth.
It’s a “fluke” Geostorm arrives just as parts of the globe are still reeling from real-life disasters, says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore.
“Within the context of these storms, when you see the trailer, it almost hits too close to home,” he adds, though generally, “outside events ordinarily don’t affect a movie’s box office. These movies rise and fall on their own merits.”
Another movie out Friday also has unfortunate timing: Only the Brave, which chronicles a tragic 2013 wildfire in Arizona that killed 19 firefighters from the elite Granite Mountain Hotshots, arrives as other crews are battling actual blazes in California. For those in the area, the movie might be hard to watch, while “the rest of the nation will be quite interested in seeing a film like that,” says Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations.
Both Only the Brave and Geostorm are tracking for US$15 million to US$20 million opening weekends.
Audiences mostly see disaster films, which have long been a part of Hollywood fare, as escapist and cathartic, Bock says: “It’s the same reason you go to watch a horror film, to be highly entertained by the ridiculous things that are going on onscreen.”
The China Syndrome, a 1979 thriller revolving around a mishap at a nuclear power plant, was released 12 days before the infamous Three Mile Island accident but still performed strongly at the box office. Action film Collateral Damage, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a firefighter who loses his family in a terrorist attack, was pushed to 2002 after being originally slated to open a month after 9/11 and still flopped.
The 2015 Dwayne Johnson thriller San Andreas was released on the heels of an earthquake in Nepal that killed nearly 9,000 — though it proved to be a hit domestically with US$155 million and did well internationally with a worldwide take of US$474 million.
Not only does the timing not hurt Geostorm, but it might make the film more relevant, says Erik Davis, managing editor at Fandango.com and Movies.com. “If the plot speaks to reality, that kind of thing actually makes people more interested in seeing it.
“Maybe an audience who isn’t going to see the Al Gore documentary (An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power) is going to see Geostorm. And maybe the takeaway is there are issues that should be addressed before we ever get to a place that is this grossly overdramatized.”
— USA Today
