Despite a healthy amount of hype and critical acclaim, the long-awaited sequel “Blade Runner 2049” suffered a drasticly underperforming opening weekend. This economic loss is one of the first hurdles in director Denis Villeneuve’s rising stardom and reputation as a filmmaker that has been able to simultaneously provide artistic merit and fiscal viability in each of his films.
However, Villeneuve seems to be taking his box office disappointment in stride. In a recent interview with Vulture, he made the bold move of not only providing an explanation as to why so few went to see his film in theaters, but also continued on to stand by those same decisions.
Villeneuve cited the decision to employ relatively spoiler-free marketing as one of the major factors for the poor financial figures. The director claimed that audiences today want too much of the plot spoon-fed to them before they spend their money to go see it. He pines for the day when audiences are willing to just walk into a cinema without any prior knowledge of the film, and just accept whatever comes to them.
And that’s fine and all. I haven’t seen “Blade Runner 2049” yet – though I have every intention to – and I have been a fan of Villeneuve since 2013’s “Prisoners,” but I am getting sick of all the complaints about so-called “spoilers.”
The concept of spoilers has bugged me for a while, but I’m starting to get to the point where I’m getting impatient with the fact that it’s risky to talk about any TV show or movie in public because apparently just knowing what’s going to happen ruins the whole thing for some people. If that was really true, why would anyone ever rewatch their favorite movies? Why would they ever pay for a movie ticket when they could just read a Wikipedia plot summary free for the same experience? If pre-knowledge of events makes a movie no longer worth the effort, it is more likely a fault of the film than of the marketing.
Perhaps what people should be complaining about is the fact that Hollywood keeps pumping out movies that are so fluffy and loosely edited that a two-minute trailer communicates an equivalent experience to its two-hour feature-length counterpart.
The current trend of bad trailers is probably just a symptom of lots of bad movies.
