Ensemble Movies and New Year's Eve (2011)

 

The producers in Hollywood are always trying to find ways to get people to go see the movies that they churn out.  One of the most popular ways to get an audience is to build an ensemble cast.  The mentality of an ensemble cast is that there will be so many different actors in the movie that almost anybody would want to see the movie for one of the actors.  There will be someone in the movie for everyone, thus making a bigger audience and generating a bigger box office.

There are different ways to go about creating a large ensemble cast for a movie.  The three main ones are to heave a large team-based movie, intertwining stories, or an anthology.  Each method of executing the story utilizes the ensemble cast in a different way.  One constant remains no matter what method is used to capitalize on the cast: the ensemble cast is there.

The team-based movie is a movie that tends to have one main storyline, and follows that story in a fairly linear way.  The method of doing this usually involves a team being put together.  This allows for the actors to interact, and many times be on the screen for more time than they would in other methods of using an ensemble cast.  Not only can the producers say that they have all of these actors together in one movie, but they can brag that certain actors will be interacting.  An example of this is with the first two Expendables movies.  With both of those movies, the producers were able to market the movie based on scenes which had Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, and Sylvester Stallone together on screen.  The fact that three big actions stars were together in a scene was definitely a selling point of the first movie, and the expanded roles of Willis and Arnold were selling points of the sequel.  The first movie really brought out the ensemble cast in it, with the three aforementioned actors, as well as Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Eric Roberts, Randy Couture, and Steve Austin.  I feel like I’m missing someone, but that list shows how filled with people the movie was.

Another way to fill a movie with actors is to have storylines that weave in and out of one another.  This is a way to try and give each of the actors their own story, thus making them all the main character of the film.  Whereas in a team movie, there will be the actors that lead the team, and the wacky side characters, the interwoven stories give many people their own piece of the lead role.  This week’s Sunday “Bad” Movie, New Year’s Eve, can help to describe what I mean.  There are a few stories that all interweave to build the movie into what it is, and each story gets one or two main characters.  There is a story with Michelle Pfeiffer and Zack Efron, one with Robert De Niro and Halle Berry, one with Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi, one with Ashton Kutcher and Lea Michele, one with Sarah Jessica Parker and Abigail Breslin, one with Seth Meyers and Jessica Biel, one with Josh Duhamel, and one with Hilary Swank.  That makes fourteen main characters.  Each of them gets a good chunk of time to shine.  There is also a wide array of supporting actors who you might recognize, scattered throughout the film.  The only downfall to this kind of storytelling is that sometimes the stories don’t feel as satisfying as they are meant to because not enough time was spent on them to invest the audience in them.  But when done properly, all of the stories can have influence upon each other in a way that makes the whole experience of watching the movie more exciting.

The third main kind of large ensemble cast movie is an anthology movie.  I’ve covered one in the Sunday “Bad” Movie posts before, The Summer of Massacre, but there aren’t any big stars in it for me to use it as an example.  For that reason, I’m going to use the recent film Movie 43 to describe what I want to describe.  When I’m talking about these big ensemble casts, I mostly mean the mainstream movies.  Movie 43 represents the mainstream anthology film.  The film boasts a star studded cast.  You’ve got Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, Josh Duhamel (that guy again?), Emma Stone, J.B. Smoove, Kieran Culkin, Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Jack MacBrayer, Jason Sudeikis, Uma Thurman, Justin Long, Leslie Bibb, Bobby Cannavale, Kristen Bell, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloe Grace Moretz, Patrick Warburton, Matt Walsh, Gerard Butler, Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Halle Berry (again), Stephen Merchant, Snooki, Terrence Howard, and Elizabeth Banks.  That’s a lot of people, not including the two different versions of the segment in which they watch these short films.  The anthology device is able to give each of these actors their own complete story to tell without it being sidetracked by other stories.  It’s a way to tell short stories with big names.  The directors of Movie 43 were also fairly famous.  The problem with anthologies is that the quality of the segments will vary, and the pacing of the movie can easily be thrown off by the varied qualities.  When it works, it works, but when it doesn’t, it is a catastrophe.

As I’ve shown in a very basic sense, there are benefits to having large ensemble casts, as well as drawbacks.  The name value alone can help to give a movie a boost in audience numbers.  But it also means that certain stars might not get the screen time that they deserve and certain stories might suffer due to other stories overpowering them.  Ensemble casts can help bring in money for the studio, but they can also lose the quality credibility that may have been built up through their previous output.  It is difficult to gauge how the ensemble movie will end up.

When all is said and done, the studio will likely still make money.  That’s the bottom line in the Hollywood system.  If something makes money, the quality doesn’t matter.  Only, it does.  Any future installments depend on how much the viewer appreciates the prior movies.  New Year’s Eve being made was based on the financial success of Valentine’s Day.  Does that mean that the quality of Valentine’s Day was good?  No.  Does it mean that the quality of New Year’s Eve was good?  Nope.  Hollywood doesn’t fix what isn’t broken.  They don’t improve something if they think they’ll make money through carbon copies.  I don’t know where I’m going with this.

Ensemble casts can both make and break a movie.  I guess that’s what I’ve been getting at through this entire post.  Many bad movies are bad because too many people were thrown into the mix.  Many good movies are good because the ensemble cast feels like a bunch of friends hanging out.  Either way, I’m always interested in seeing the movies.  If they’re bad, they’re bad.  But I like bad movies, so there’s that.

There are a few notes to make before this post is complete:

• Jessica Biel and Sean O'Bryan are in New Year’s Eve.  They were also in Playing for Keeps.
• They aren't the only people in another Sunday “Bad” Movies film.  Cary Elwes is in New Year’s Eve, but he’s also in Hansel and Gretel Get Baked and The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure.
• There’s also an appearance by Robert DeNiro in New Year’s Eve.  He was in Freelancers.
• Don't forget Til Schweiger, who was in New Year's Eve.  He was in Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo way back when.
• An actress named Christine Lakin was in New Year's Eve, as well as Parental Guidance.
• Finally, John Lithgow made a small appearance in New Year’s Eve.  He made a bigger appearance in Santa Claus: The Movie.
• If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can either leave a comment below, or message me on Twitter.  There are lots of movies scheduled to come up in the next year or so, and many of them are suggestions, so I do make note of what I am suggested.