Why "art house" is a wholly subjective term
Recently I took issue with another one of Scott Mendelson’s Forbes pieces, where he claimed that Birds of Prey’s box office issues would adversely affect James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad film……despite the fact that there are two whole DC films releasing in between the two.
If you missed it on Twitter, here’s what I responded with:
As you can see over the course of a whole day since I first tweeted this, a lot of people at least understood and/or agreed with my point. The budgets and investments in both movies are so wildly different that it’s outright laziness to compare the two and act like one’s under-performance is some kind of death knell for the other. They’re not the same kind of movie productions in so many ways.
About halfway through the day, the trolling started and it was honestly very predictable. The method of attack was to harp on my use of the term “art house” to describe a comic book movie with an $80 to $90 million reported production budget, released by a major motion picture studio. Seemingly all the opposite of what art house actually is.
Yeah, not exactly. At least not in any objective sense.
There is a general perception among the Twitter masses about what art house cinema actually is, and when you search for a definition of it, you don’t get a completely uniform answer.
Here’s Cambridge Dictionary’s definition:
Here’s the Collins Dictionary definition:
Urban Dictionary:
Quora:
Netflix:
And finally, the website Wonderful Cinema:
Not very uniform or objectively determined, is it? Well, that’s because arthouse isn’t an objective term at all. It’s a subjective one that is defined by our perceptions of what it actually is.
Now even with that being the case, we can still pick out some consistent things that are included in the different definitions:
Typically independently produced
Not extremely popular or successful
Deeper than usual Hollywood films
To be honest, none of that is objectively determined either. The big studios like WB have all had or put some backing into independent studios at some point or another, meaning that independent films have most certainly at the end of the day been financed by major studios.
But then there’s the question of how much the studios backed them, which is where we come to the Birds of Prey situation.
If not for Shazam, Birds of Prey would unquestionably be the lowest budgeted DCEU movie in history, and it still might be if you accept reports that Shazam’s budget was closer to $100 million while Birds of Prey was well below that. The point here is that it wasn’t given the same financial investment as the other DCEU films, like Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, all made for no less than $225 million apiece, or Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, all reportedly with budgets between $150 million and $167 million.
So Birds of Prey is a movie that was made for MAYBE a little over half the budget of it’s “predecessor,” Suicide Squad, and despite the star power of Margot Robbie, couldn’t command a budget of even $100 million, or secure a summer tentpole release date. Why is that, perhaps?
Because WB wasn’t nearly as invested in this film as it has been in others, or currently is with Wonder Woman 1984, The Batman or The Suicide Squad. The people that complain about Birds of Prey’s marketing can chime in here, as we can see even in a subjective sense that Wonder Woman’s marketing kicked off months ago at CCXP, took a brief break for Birds of Prey, and then immediately resumed press right after Birds of Prey’s opening weekend.
So in relation to the DCEU, and for that matter all other comic book films outside of Joker, Birds of Prey is one of the cheapest ones to exist by the numbers. Not independently produced, but certainly treated like the comic book movie equivalent of such.
Alright, that’s the numbers aspect. Now into the content itself.
Birds of Prey’s movie perception absolutely fits the “art house” definition. It’s critically acclaimed and those who have actually seen it have largely loved it, but it’s not bringing in those masses, and while everyone has been scrambling for a thousand think pieces to explain why that is, it might be as simple as “it’s a different kind of comic book movie.” I’ve seen people compare the expectations of Birds of Prey to that of Wonder Woman and others with respect to popularity, and I don’t understand how that can logically be concluded. Sure there’s hindsight with how much many of us thought Harley Quinn/Margot Robbie’s popularity would carry in the general audience, but WB let Robbie and Cathy Yan make this movie rated R, and gave them a considerable amount of creative freedom with respect to story, editing and cinematography choices.
Anyone that sees Birds of Prey and concludes that it’s a movie that should be easily accessible for the general audience, might have a very different understanding of what “accessible” means in this case. It’s a “niche” movie, seriously. Even in the comic book movie genre. This isn’t Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel or even Black Widow. This is a movie about a female super villain gaining her independence from her psychopath villain of a boyfriend, and telling the story of how a young girl and three other women helped her achieve it. That’s not an easily accessible story for the general audience at large, nor does it have to be, because it’s a DEEPER story at its core. Doesn’t matter how much action it has, the story and the unique character beats are all there, subjectively speaking.
The laziness of the trolls on Twitter immediately took the context used by the trades that call Birds of Prey a blockbuster comic book film and use it to generalize the film as one cut from the exact same cloth of “action over depth” as almost all other comic book films have been made in the past decade. That’s a subjective opinion if you want to do that, but someone else calling it a deeper “art house” experience, is not objectively wrong in the slightest. You just disagree with them.
When I called Birds of Prey “a small budget art house sequel to Ayer’s Suicide Squad,” I didn’t misspeak at all. In my mind, that’s exactly what it is. It’s one of the lowest budgeted comic book movies made in the Shared Cinematic Universe era, the studio gave the creators more freedom to make it rated R and tell the deeper story they wanted to tell with it, and it wasn’t a movie that connected with the general audience in a massively popular way. You can consider all of that a rationalization if you like, but of course that is the beauty of “It’s all subjective.” You don’t have to agree with me.
You can’t call me wrong about it, though. Well, you can but that wouldn’t make any sense since opinions cannot objectively be right or wrong. Opinions are determined by our feelings and emotions on the subject, which eliminates all possible objectivity, and the definition of art house is wholly subjective in that matter, not only because there’s no universally objective definition, but also because everything in the definitions are subjectively determined, even in the case of independent production because the major studios can and have financed independent films. Birds of Prey is a studio film, there’s no question about that, but how it was financed, made and ultimately released to the public, just doesn’t fit what we’ve seen with other bigger DCEU films and what we are certain to see with Wonder Woman 1984, The Batman and The Suicide Squad all coming up in the next year and a half.
Maybe that’s where our answers on “what happened with Birds of Prey’s box office” ultimately lie. It’s not the same as all of the other comic book films that are largely popular and seen by the masses. There’s a thought, eh?
So ultimately, if I have any response to the trolls and others with incredulous reactions to my opinion of Birds of Prey being art house for comic book films, it’s the same as my response to Mendelson at Forbes: Stop being lazy with this, seriously. Just because you all have a socially agreed upon definition of art house doesn’t make it objective fact and it never will, and just because Birds of Prey isn’t the same as films from A24, Searchlight or other smaller indie films, doesn’t mean that it can’t be considered art house in the comic book movie genre as a whole. You can either agree or disagree with it, but it’s not “wrong” and it never will be. It’s all subjective.