gnome (nōm) n.
A pithy saying that expresses a general truth or fundamental principle; an aphorism.
Gnome #2:
People generally don’t like movies with birds in them.
(Gnome #2.5: Pterodactyls count as birds. Perhaps penguins.)
It’s true. I don’t claim to understand it entirely, but throw a few birds into the plot of a movie and suddenly it’s Q Score goes through the floor.
Perhaps the most infamous of them all…Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. A lot of people will tell you that The Birds was a classic and is their favorite movie of all time. They’re lying.
Up until the disaster known as The Birds, bird movies actually did alright. The film failed to land in the Top 10 of any metric, it’s not even in Hitchcock’s Top 10, landing at #13. The Birds was so terrible it may well be solely responsible for every bird movie disaster since.
The most recent victim of the bird curse was a nice little movie that no one went to see, The Big Year (2011). With an all star cast including Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, and Jack Black it has a lot going for it right out the gate. Beautifully shot with a wonderful script, the movie is rewatchable like few movies made nowadays. And it’s about birds.
The Big Year opened to a dismal $3.25M despite being in wide release. Reports from the test screening made it clear that the audience was simple ‘uncomfortable’ with the subject matter…birds. This led to a bad marketing campaign and a dismal opening.
Steven Spielberg learned of the curse the hard way, overusing Pterodactyls in the later Jurrasic Park films. Did you see the animated Free Birds (2013)? Neither did anyone else.
The recent Best Picture Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) might seem to defy this gnome, but the Birdman was the antagonist, so clearly the audience was rooting against him. Plus, a person in a bird suit doesn’t count. If you stop and think about it, I am sure just about every decent bird movie you can think of has a person in a bird suit. Batman, The Crow, the hawkmen from Flash Gordon…the list goes on. All popular, and not birds.
You see, putting the ‘bird’ in the title is just plain silly, but then someone realized the bird suit exemption and renamed the film Birdman. The audience now knows they’ll be seeing someone in a bird suit and Boom! Best Picture Oscar.
I know, it’s crazy. Almost like I’m just making this up as I go along.
The good news is that Hollywood is learning. Desperate to break the ‘bird curse’, major studios have started trying to desensitize audiences at a very young age by using animation and skirting around bird usage by deploying ‘near birds’ in recent hits. ‘Near birds’ include things like bats or penguins, animals that make the audience think they might be watching a bird movie without making them uncomfortable.
And it may be working. The bird movie Rio managed to break the curse long enough to deliver a sequel, giving studios enough faith to try a few penguin films. So far so good, but time will tell.
Well, that’s it for today. If you’ve discovered a worthwhile bird movie, treasure it. But try not to let them bird movies get you down. Just remember they’re just movies. Movies with birds in them.
