They finally managed to capture how I feel during most previews.
In my limited experience with the entertainment industry, as well as my time as a film student, I’ve run up against a lot of terms that people in Hollywood like to throw around. Typically they’re the sort of jargon that some guy will toss around at a Hollywood bar to get a girl to believe that he’s a power player so she’ll sleep with him (in reality, he probably takes out James Franco’s trash). If you live anywhere near Hollywood, you’ve probably heard them before: First-look deal, back-end, package, points, etc. Then there’s my favorite term of all, one so seemingly contradictory that, when you think about it, it only makes sense that it could have come out of Tinseltown.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “high concept.”
High concept refers to a premise/idea that is so simple that it can be entirely explained by the title or a short sentence. I’ll give some of my favorite examples to illustrate this. Back to the Future - high concept. Jaws - high concept. Wedding Crashers, Gladiator, Night of the Living Dead, Speed, Robocop, and on and on. It’s pretty fair to say that, looking at these titles, you know exactly what these movies are about before you so much as see a trailer. Moreover, the movies themselves are so simple that the title is the only exposition you really need. The dudes in Wedding Crashers crash weddings. Marty needs to get Back to the Future. A group of people needs to survive the Night of the Living Dead. To visit the Apatow-verse for a minute, The 40-Year-Old Virgin may be the most high concept title in the history of cinema, and Knocked Up is no slouch either. However, I feel that it’s important to qualify that a high concept movie may be simple and easily described by its title, but that doesn’t necessarily make it brain dead (i.e. The Godfather)
Now, a low concept movie is one where the immediate premise doesn’t jump out at you and the title is often ambiguous. Consider, for a moment, There Will Be Blood. For one thing, it sounds like a horror movie…which it isn’t. If it had been called Oil! after the Upton Sinclair book it was quasi-not-really adapted from, it would have been a bit more high concept. Further, There Will Be Blood doesn’t have a simple plot that Joe Sixpack can understand. It’s about a multitude of different things instead of, say, Daniel Plainview has x amount of time to build an oil derrick or his son will be taken from him because he has no money, just to throw a generic plot out there. Other examples of low concept movies include Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, A Clockwork Orange, I’m Not There and Adaptation. These are movies which don’t necessarily appeal to the mainstream in part because they aren’t easily explained by the title or a one sentence summary. Typically, low concept movies tend to be independent. Of course, high concept movies can also come from independent sources. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, anyone?
At its core, the term is kind of ridiculous, because on the surface you wouldn’t think of White Chicks as high concept, if only because the natural reaction for a lot of people is to equate high concept with highbrow. And high concept movies can certainly be highbrow. But, well…
As you may be aware, College, the movie whose poster I have displayed above, was released a couple weeks ago to damning reviews and almost non-existent interest. If you watch the trailer above, it looks like any other cookie-cutter teen comedy about college, the sort of benign little movie that will come and go and be something I’ll drunkenly stumble upon when it’s on HBO at 3 AM. Well, it would be benign, anyway, if not for its title.
It’s my belief that this movie signals the moment that “high concept” officially jumped the shark. It’s come close before with White Chicks and The Hot Chick, not to mention Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, and my personal favorite, Slip Me A Roofie And Steal My Wallet Movie. We reached the point a long, long time ago where movies would get greenlit largely based on whether their titles grabbed executives and were sufficiently “high concept,” but things are quickly reaching the point of no return. It all comes down to marketing, obviously, and it’s much easier to market College than it is to market I’m Not There, if only because the audience knows exactly what it’s getting when it walks into the former. However, that doesn’t excuse the complete and utter lack of imagination that’s taken hold here.
The movie is called College, for fuck’s sake! Can you think of a more generic, brain dead title for a movie about college? The closest I can come is Frat House, and even that requires you to think a fraction of a second longer. When I see posters for movies like this I half expect an invisible hand to reach out and punch me while screaming, “Is that simple enough for you, asshole?!” I’m sorry, but as a moviegoer I find it downright insulting that the studios honestly seem to think the public is this dumb, that they need a title that’s so on-the-nose and unimaginative to get people in theaters. I mean, come on guys, did you honestly think nobody was going to know what the hell this movie was about if you called it anything but College? Even College Road Trip would have been a more imaginative title, and in perhaps the most telling example of the state of the movie industry, a movie with that same title already came out in 2008.
That brings me to the most ironic part about this movie: its tagline is “Best. Weekend. Ever.” In fact, when you watch the trailer, this comes on and you end up thinking it’s called that…until “College” shows up and you nearly have an aneurysm due to how fucking stupid a title it is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Best. Weekend. Ever. is at least a somewhat clever title that isn’t too far off the mark and would at least elicit a chuckle from someone like me, who would never pay to see the movie. However, if it gets even a modicum of positive response out of me, you have to think a clever title like that might sway a few more people to see the movie from the target audience. I mean, come on, I highly doubt people wouldn’t know what the hell the movie is about if it had a different title.
If that’s not enough, here’s another example of high concept madness: Meet Dave, the latest Eddie Murphy disaster, didn’t set the box office on fire. I know, shocking, right? But that’s not the story here. What’s interesting about this latest mess is, of course, the title. If you ask me, Meet Dave is a very stupid title that sounds like…wait for it…a marketing tagline! Now, do you know what Meet Dave’s original title was? The much more high concept Starship Dave. Supposedly, it got changed because, believe it or not, the studios thought people wouldn’t get it.
Um…what? Hold on Hollywood, let me get this straight. You think people are too stupid to figure out a movie is about college, so you name it College to avoid any confusion, but you also think they’re too fucking dumb to grasp the unbelievably abstract concept of Eddie Murphy being a giant spaceship? Even when the movie is called Starship Dave? Then you respond by giving it the title Meet Dave, which doesn’t even make any sense! Why are we meeting Dave? Is this a movie about an odd dinner guest and we’re being asked to meet him before the wacky adventure begins? Seriously guys, what the fuck?
In a way, I guess it was only a matter of time before we got to this point. The studios are now frightened of piracy more than ever, not to mention competing industries distracting their target audience of teenage boys. Therefore, they need to ensure that everything they release makes money, so they can’t take any chances whatsoever. This leads to them optioning every single book, comic and game in existence, sometimes before they’re released, if only so they can tap into a built-in audience, no matter how small it is. But more than that, it’s convinced the studios that the only way to be successful is to assume that the average American is so blindingly stupid that they need a leash to guide them to everything. And if that leash isn’t there, then the movie isn’t going to make any money because people will be too dumb to get it. What’s so infuriating about this is, as you’ve seen, high concept doesn’t have to mean “completely fucking insultingly dumb.” Unfortunately, these days, the studios are more concerned with the bottom line than ever, which has caused them to take things to even more moronic extremes.
There is a silver lining to all this, however. College was an abject box office failure, opening well outside the top 10 on what is sure to be one of the lowest grossing weekends of the year. It failed to even make $3 million and will likely be on DVD by Thanksgiving. If anything, this movie’s complete no-show at the box office gives me some hope for the moviegoing public. Sure, we may have made Wild Hogs a box office smash. But by roundly rejecting College, we may have finally shown how dumb is too dumb.
And it’s dumber than we could have possibly imagined.
