Month: July 2023

Over the weekend, I decided to check out the new faith-based thriller, Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel.  My overall impressions were that it was a solid little thriller tackling a very serious issue: Child sex trafficking.  I reviewed the film on Sunday, so you can check it out.  I stand by my review of the film 100 percent.  However: when it comes to movies that deal with human trafficking, honesty is always the best policy.  The problem with Sound of Freedom isn’t necessarily the film itself, but the people that inspired it, namely Tim Ballard and his organization, Operation Underground Railroad(O.U.R.).  But first, let me tackle an issue that bothered me watching the movie, and it takes place during the credits.  There’s a message from actor Jim Caviezel thanking people for getting out and seeing the movie.  Harmless, right?  Not necessarily, but I’m not done.  He goes on to encourage other people to see the movie either via Angel Studios’ Pay It Forward program or buy tickets to see it so the audience feels that they can help end the trafficking of children.  Here’s the problem: If you want to thank your audience, you do it before the movie starts, but you also don’t encourage your audience to buy more tickets when they’re already in the theater.  It smells of desperation.  Secondly, by doing that, you are essentially undercutting the message the movie’s trying to convey.  Instead of encouraging people to research what they can do to help, Mr. Caviezel asks for more money.  Not directly mind you, but that’s what he’s implying.  You don’t want the last image your audience sees of the movie, an actor essentially begging for money.

That brings me to Tim Ballard, a former Homeland Security agent who founded O.U.R.  On the surface, what he’s advocating is something that everybody should be talking about: Human trafficking.  Great.  That’s something that everyone can get behind, regardless of your politics.  The problem with Mr. Ballard is that in the decade since he founded his organization, things have come to light about how he runs his organization and how they conduct “stings” to save children.  A lot of red flags were raised by various sources including Vice and American Crime Journal.  Essentially, he got caught in multiple falsehoods and exaggerations about the operations he’s conducted.  Multiple law enforcement agencies knew about these guys, and warned that O.U.R could do more harm than good with victims.  Since the release of the film, there’s been a lot of articles coming out about Ballard and his organization.  For instance, we know that he has never disclosed what happens to the money that O.U.R gets from conservative and religious donors.  The lack of transparancy is incredibly concerning.  There was a thread on Twitter from Dr. Lindsay Stallones Marshall about the negative impact of Ballard’s operations.  In that thread there is an article from Slate that details someone who went on a raid with Ballard’s team to rescue children and ended up being haunted by the event.  It’s clear from some of these sources that O.U.R is not providing aftercare for the victims of human trafficking.  Sure, the body can heal, but psychological damage from these crimes is long-lasting and requires professional help, which Ballard’s organization doesn’t seem to provide.  Also, they are inadvertantly creating the demand for this crap.  It’s clear to me that Tim Ballard is a glory-seeking liar and grifter out for his own gratification.

So, where does actor Jim Caviezel fit into all of this?  Well, like Ballard, Mr. Caviezel is a very conservative and religious individual.  Nothing terribly wrong with that, except that Mr. Caviezel has fallen prey to QAnon conspiracy theories and lies that were also being pushed by Ballard and Utah’s Attorney General, Sean Reyes.  Look, Jim Caviezel is a good actor when he picks the right material.  I think he’s great in Sound of Freedom.  I really do.  But ever since he played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, he’s become very gullible when it comes to conspiracy theories.  Do I blame Angel Studios for all of this?  Strangely, no.  Yeah, they’re a faith-based film-making group based in Provo, Utah, but the controversy surrounding Sound of Freedom can be laid at the feet of Ballard and Caviezel.  As I said before, I stand by my review of the film.  I’m not here to tell you NOT to see it.  I’m here to tell you to be aware of the issues surrounding the film, and whether or not that’s going to affect your decision to see it.  The issue of human trafficking is a legitimate issue, but it can’t be tackled by people who would take advantage of the situation for their own gain.  The right-wing media is attacking the left because the liberal media wants the actual truth behind O.U.R, and we’re not getting it.  Not from Ballard, not from Caviezel and certainly not the conservative and religious right.  This post may lay bare my political and social leanings, but what I’m interested in is the truth.  I want Ballard and O.U.R to come forward and be honest about how they operate and how they deal with the victims, because right now, I’m having a very difficult believing anything they claim.

A few years back, I made a post comparing the difference between low-budget movies and big-budget movies.  The threshold for a low-budget movie to be successful is not as high as a big-budget movie.  Why?  For a movie just to break even, it needs to make back at least 2.5x its budget.  That includes production, marketing, overhead, and other stuff.  A hundred million dollar movie would need to make at at 250-300 million just to break even.  To be considered profitable, it needs to make at least 400 million or more.  A good chunk of that needs to be made within the first two weeks of its release.  Why do I bring this up?  I went and saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny yesterday, the latest and final film in the Harrison Ford-led film series.  It was okay for what it was.  Nothing ground-breaking, but it wasn’t anywhere near as great as Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade.  Indy 5 was made on a 330 million dollar budget, making it one of the most expensive movies of the year.  Here’s the problem:  Domestically, it barely hit 60 million on its opening day.  Internationally, 70 million opening day.  Total for the weekend thus far is about 152 million on a 330 million dollar budget.  OUCH.  The Flash also had a very weak opening at 55 million domestic.  It’s projected that The Flash is going to be a total failure in the box office.  The movie is even being removed from over 1,500 movie theaters because it performed so badly.  Shazam: Fury of the Gods couldn’t even must 150 million world-wide in its total run.  The new Dungeons and Dragons movie couldn’t even hit 200 million on 150 million.  To be fair, some movies this year were expected not to be super successful.  But superhero movies?  Indiana Jones?  What’s going on?

I’ll tell you:  For superhero movies, with the exception of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Guardians of the Galaxy 3, people just aren’t going to see superhero movies as much.  Some attribute it to “superhero movie fatigue.”  I don’t believe that one bit.  No, people are sick and tired of going to mediocre movies.  THAT’S where the fatigue is.  The Flash is a bit more complicated with legal issues surrounding the film’s star, Ezra Miller, but it’s more than that.  People don’t trust the DC universe right now.  The franchise has been severely damaged by under-performing movies over the past decade.  While there were a lot of people that liked Zack Snyder’s movies like Man of Steel, more people didn’t.  The only two really successful DCEU movies have been Aquaman and the first Wonder Woman.  Aquaman brought in over a billion dollars during its run, while Wonder Woman managed over 800 million.  But the question remains:  Why are studios spending so much on movies that are failing?  Inflation aside, there’s no reason for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to cost nearly 350 million dollars.  No reason whatsoever, when you could’ve either made the film for half that, or made 2 or 3 movies for that kind of money.  No.  This is Disney flexing it’s money-spending muscles thinking that the more money they put into a project, the more successful its going to be.  That just isn’t the case.  A movie is only successful if people go and see it.  People will only go to see a movie if the marketing did its job and got people interested.  Lately, that hasn’t been the case, especially for DC and Warner Bros.  These companies will be LOSING money on movies like Indiana Jones and The Flash.  For me, the reason why I didn’t particularly think these movies were that great is because of the blatant nostalgia-baiting.  WB spent a lot of time advertising that Michael Keaton was returning as Batman.  He was great, but most of the target audience weren’t really going to know who he was, unless they’ve seen Tim Burton’s Batman films.  Indy throws a lot of “Hey, look: I’m an Indiana Jones movie” moments at you, without actually caring about crafting a compelling narrative.  Nostalgia alone doesn’t make a movie.  You need good writing, and we haven’t been seeing a lot of that this year.  You can really tell the amount of money that goes into these movies just by watching the trailer.  The only film-maker who has managed to throw that kind of money at a movie and have it be successful is James Cameron.  He knows the business inside and out.  He’s also in tune with what audiences like and what they want to see.  That’s why he has three of the highest-grossing films in history under his belt: Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Titanic.

Do I want to see these movies bomb?  Of course not.  Winning helps everybody.  But there’s a degree of hubris on display here where studios think they know what the audiences want and throw all the money at their projects.  They think their audiences are stupid, and that’s what’s biting them in the ass.  There were a lot of movies this year that I was and am still looking forward to, but the biggest ones that I’ve seen have not been good.  So.  How much money does Indy 5 need to make its money back?  At 330 million dollars, it would to make about 700 million.  I don’t see it getting there.  The word of mouth isn’t particularly great and the target audience just doesn’t care.  Let’s take a look at a low-budget movie: The Invisible Man.  This movie was about a woman trying to get out of an abusive relationship, but ends up being haunted by some unseen force.  The movie was made for 7 million dollars.  It’s total box office take?  Over 144 million dollars.  It was a run-away success.  That’s because the amount the movie needed to make back was only 14-20 million dollars.  The more a movie costs to make, the more it has to work at being profitable.  I’m not saying that every movie should be a low-budget movie.  Far from it.  But if you’re going to spend more than 200 million on a movie, you need to use that money wisely.  That’s why film-makers like James Cameron are as successful as they are.  Yeah, the budgets for these movies are getting way out of hand, and you can see the damage being done when they fail.  Movies studios have been shuttered because of box-office failures.  Careers have ended because of it.  Not every movie is going to be successful.  Some of the best movies ever made bombed at the box office.  But that’s usually due to bad marketing.  Right now, it’s not just bad marketing, it’s bad targeting.  Who are these movies actually for?  I think these movie studios have lost touch with their audiences.  Some of the target audiences have aged out and no longer care, some have died, and others are just not willing to go the movie theaters anymore when they can sit at home and stream the film a month after it’s theatrical release.  It’s a changing industry, but some of these studios aren’t paying attention to WHY things are changing.  You can’t just throw half a billion dollars at a movie and expect it to be successful.  It might’ve been with an extremely robust home video market, but that’s no longer the case, even though I think physical media is going to make a comeback.  But that’s a topic for another time.  So, yeah, expensive movies are costly in more ways than you can imagine, and we’re starting to see the real consequences of over-spending.