Mank director David Fincher thinks Hollywood is being unimaginative by giving all the attention to superhero movies and Oscar bait films.
Mank director David Fincher calls out the dominance of superhero and Oscar bait movies. After a rough start to his film career on the legendarily troubled Alien3, Fincher quickly established himself as a top Hollywood director with a run of classics including Se7en, Fight Club and Zodiac. In 2010 Fincher released what many consider his masterpiece, the drama The Social Network, featuring an Oscar-winning script by Aaron Sorkin.
In the years since The Social Network made Fincher a major Oscars player, the director has seen his feature film output slow to a crawl, with only two movies to his name: the thrillers The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. Fincher of course has been very active in series television, helping bring House of Cards to the screen and acting as executive producer and showrunner for the show Mindhunter (which unfortunately does not look like it will be back for a third season). Next up, Fincher will break his feature drought with the black and white drama Mank, about the making of Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane.
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Fincher’s Mank indeed has received strong reviews and is likely to garner a lot of awards buzz in this most bizarre of awards seasons, but don’t be surprised if Fincher isn’t too enthused about the possibility of winning hardware for his movie. Speaking recently to Total Film (via Games Radar), Fincher talked about his disdain for the whole concept of awards season and how the very idea of seasons helps film executives program audiences’ expectations in a way Fincher clearly thinks is unhealthy. He said:
“There’s really only two seasons for movies. There’s ‘spandex summer’ and there’s ‘affliction winter’. You’re making your movie for one of two seasons. And if you miss, you’ll fall into one of those other two seasons, which are nominally dumping grounds. Does that make sense?”
Though Fincher does admit to being a “jaded f—k” when it comes to such things, he points out that due to his long experience in film he is “an informed, jaded f—k.” Whether Fincher’s point-of-view is jaded or not, it’s true that Hollywood has created a release schedule where the summer is dominated by franchise movies while the winter becomes the place for Oscar bait, films that have clearly been crafted with awards recognition in mind. The tropes of Oscar bait movies are indeed as ingrained as the clichés of summer blockbusters, much to the evident dismay of Fincher.
That Fincher chooses to call out Oscar bait films as much as big franchise movies is in fact interesting, as in recent years several filmmakers have gotten themselves in trouble by just slamming superhero movies, the most notable example being Martin Scorsese who enraged Marvel fans with his 2019 comments about how the films are merely theme park rides. Fincher goes a little farther by throwing in “affliction winter” films, but his overall point about Hollywood reducing everything to formula and thereby squashing creativity is still the same. Like many another filmmaker, including Scorsese, Fincher has now fled to the greener pastures of Netflix where there’s no first-weekend box office pressure and filmmakers have greater freedom to pursue their passion projects without direct studio meddling. It will be interesting to see how much Mank breaks the Oscar bait mold, and whether it indeed gets attention from the Academy.
Source: Total Film (via Games Radar)
- Mank (2020)Release date: Dec 04, 2020
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