I was strictly speaking box office, and they don't necessarily have anything in common because a film can be one of the most creative ever made and still not generate box office
You're absolutely right, MB. How many of you have seen the 2011 film
Melancholia? How many of you have
heard of it? It's an end-of-the-world flick that is undoubtedly one of the most creative and beautifully filmed of that genre. It won tons of awards and award nominations. The critics were in high praise. Those who saw it were amazed. Of course, one of the reasons for its low box office was bad marketing and it being viewed as "artsy." But there have been poorly marketed and "artsy" films which were highly creative and wonderfully done that rose high in box office because of word-of-mouth. It didn't make gobs of money (yet) for the studio, but those of us who took the time and spent the money (including in gas to drive hours to a city that had a theater showing it), find that the time and money was well worth it. I only wish the studio that made
Melancholia (Zentropa - no, I hadn't heard of it until this film either) somehow had found a way to get the word out.
And we need to remember that creativity is in the eye of the creator (and eventually the viewer). Could they have made a highly creative, straight, gothic-horror-romance version of DS? I'm sure they could. But who'd see it? As has been mentioned here before, we've been inundated with straight, gothic-horror-romance movies (and most not so creative -
Twilight, oh, ick). It's understandable when studios want to capitalize on what's popular, but when it turns into saturation, ticket-payers have a tendency to stay away from what was momentarily popular to the same-old-same-old. There are people here who will remember the "disaster" genre of the '70's. It began with
Airport (no, not
Airplane -
Airport) in 1970, followed by
The Poseidon Adventure in 1972, and climaxed with
The Towering Inferno in 1974. There were others, but they couldn't surpass TTI and tried all sorts of gimmicks like the seat-shaking sensaround in
Earthquake. You could tell the studios were getting desperate in hoping that the same-old-same-old would continue to make money. But people, who initially loved all those early disaster films, became tired of watching bygone stars of yesteryear falling/burning/being-crushed to their deaths. How many times could Olivia DeHavilland be saved from a crashed airliner or a swarm of killer bees? By the end of the '70's, the whole disaster genre, done to death, became nothing but fodder for sarcasm, ending with its tombstone in the brilliant comedy
Airplane. DS doesn't need to be another
Twilight, even if its not and even if it could be done in a dark vein without it being another
Twilight. But the market is now saturated, so it had to do something because Warner Bros. probably figured (and rightly so) that audiences would perceive it as such.
Gerard