Fresh out of MIFF (The Melbourne International Film Festival), our movie nerds pick up a question that the festival left hanging for them. What happened to the mid-budget film, and why does almost nobody go to the cinema for one anymore?
Saj and Alice start with the middle ground that used to fill cinemas, the erotic thrillers, legal dramas, and rom coms, Basic Instinct, Erin Brockovich, The Pelican Brief, and Reality Bites.
From there they venture into the disappearance of eroticism from mainstream film, what changed on set between the nineties and now, and what Babygirl, I Want Your Sex, and Wuthering Heights suggest about audiences quietly wanting it back, then ask whether a cinema full of people giggling through a sex scene might say more about us than it does about the film.
Alice and Saj then turn to what gets people out of the house. Spectacle, franchise, and Intellectual Property (IP) on one side, The Odyssey, Spider-Man, Fast and Furious, and on the other a twenty-dollar ticket, a cost-of-living crisis, and a streaming subscription already paid for. They discuss whether star power still exists for anyone under forty, whether a director’s name pulls harder than an actors, and the particular pleasure of sitting in an audience that is all there for the same thing, whether that is a horror crowd, a Barbie crowd, or a cinema full of queer people at Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.
Their conclusion. The mid-budget film did not die. It moved.