The name is familiar, and so are the stars, but critics hated the new War of the Worlds movie so much that initially, not one gave the Amazon Prime release a positive review on Rotten Tomatoes. It didn’t seem to matter: the low-budget film became Amazon’s most popular feature project in August, hitting No. 1 for most of a week and remaining in the top five most of the month. Not bad for a film that critics savaged.
For the film’s producer Patrick Aiello, that over-performance suggests, once again, the declining power of critical takes in driving audiences to digitally distributed projects.
“Streamers are very much their own planets, so much so outside our galaxy” of traditional filmmakers, said Aielllo, who has a dozen producer credits in a long career with stops at MGM, Hyde Park and Spelling TV. “They’re not concerned with critical reception of their work. At the end of the day, I had to ask myself the question: Do critics matter any more? And did they ever matter in the digital space?”
Aiello acknowledges that critics can still be vital in the success of small prestige projects given a traditional “platform” release beginning with a small number of theaters in big cities.
But when it comes to digitally released projects, algorithms may rule all, delivering a given film to just the right, highly targeted film to a specific tranche of their vast audience. Indeed, that’s why Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos has routinely resisted theatrical releases for all but a handful of his company’s many feature-length projects, and those mostly to qualify them for Oscar runs and traditionalist voters’ preferences.
Regardless, it’s been a rough time for critics of many stripes the past quarter century or so. As newspapers contracted in the internet era, those critics of books, films, TV, and music often were among the first to get cut. Meanwhile, legions of people with online accounts and strong opinions proved they had little need for an understanding of, say, filmmaking craft or history to gather substantial audiences.
The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh had a lengthy takeout recently on how “music critics lost their edge” as they evolved from grumpy white guys holding the line on acceptably rough-edged indie rock artistry to a broader acceptance, by critics of many backgrounds, of the achievements of popular music of many kinds.
Also, Sanneh pointed out, it’s a lot tougher these days for a music critic to whisper even the mildest pejoratives in the general direction of work of superstars such as Taylor Swift, Cardi B, and Beyoncé. Their obsessively ardent fan bases tend to punish such transgressors rapidly and repeatedly. And don’t even start on the politically loaded critiques over woke versus non-woke projects, which further skew many critical assessments.
Regardless, more than 40 legitimate film critics (as determined by Rotten Tomatoes weighed in on Aiello’s War. For quite some time, none of them registered enough positivity to nudge the Tomato Meter past zero (it’s now at 2 percent; the audience meter is 21 percent).
The film stars actor/rapper Ice Cube as an intensely online cyber-defense worker at the Department of Homeland Security, desperately trying to keep his children safe amid the kind of titular alien invasion first envisioned in H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel. Eva Longoria plays a NASA scientist, and the inevitable Clark Gregg plays the director of Homeland Security.
Screenwriters Kenny Golde and Marc Hyman update Wells’ take considerably, adding in issues around government surveillance and privacy. It adds a further twist with invaders who consume data, not unlike all those AI large language models consuming every bit they can Hoover up.
Plenty of people, critics or otherwise, weighed in online, often piling on about their distaste for a perfectly adequate, somewhat imperfect, modestly ambitious thriller that’s mostly about a very intense dude trying to protect his adult children. In that regard, at least, it’s not much different from Tom Cruise’s character in 2005’s Steven Spielberg-directed version of the movie, minus many (but not all) of the smash-bang visual effects.
Despite critical and online harrumphing, the film still managed to break through a bit elsewhere on social media and even traditional media. ESPN sports-talk radio host Clinton Yates talked about watching the film with his children, calling it “an operating-system movie,” i.e., its many scenes showing text/phone/Facetime/surveillance camera conversations between Cube and his kids, in between his work surveilling most of society for other threats as part of his job with the Department of Homeland Security.
Yates, who was prepared to hate watch the film instead found some upsides: it was “ a sweet 90 minutes” (technically, it’s 91 minutes long) and “overall, it was a good time,” Yates said. So, at least a little better than a 2% Tomato.
That the film exists at all is something of a minor Hollywood miracle. Aiello said he got the idea for the project when he learned that Wells’ original novel was coming out of copyright into the public domain. He had worked with the ScreenLife film technology developed by Kazakh/Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (also a producer on the film) on multiple previous film projects, and thought it could provide a low-cost way to tell many parts of the story for far less than a Spielberg-sized budget..
“It was bona fide (intellectual property),” Aiello said. “The title value I knew ultimately down the road would be marketing juice, meat, that a marketing department could get behind.”
Basically, people would know what to expect from the project’s name, which makes marketing easier, and more likely to entice some of them to watch. This is a particularly well known story over the past 130 years. Wells’ book (and previous newspaper serialization) led to Orson Wells’ massively influential 1930s radio play, and then multiple previous movie versions, most notably Spielberg’s. The downside of all that marketing juice is that many people have expectations about what a War of the Worlds ought to be. This film is not that.
The production budget was “quite a ways below $10 million,” Aiello said. For comparison, Spielberg’s take cost a reported $132 million to produce in 2005 (figure another eight to nine figures to market it). Twenty years later, that’s equivalent to about $218 million, which sounds like what a typically massive Spielberg action project would cost now.
Partly this year’s model was much smaller because, back around the pandemic lockdown, Aiello struggled to find traditional up-front financing, That forced him to run the project “through a shell operation,” using expensive interim financing, just to get it made.
A pell-mell 15-day shooting schedule took advantage of Los Angeles’ locked-down empty streets and run-and-gun filming around COVID restrictions, while ScreenLife helped illustrate many of the film’s key conversations and conflicts, rather than relying on big visual-effects set pieces.
Even so, the film underwent four major edits before finally landing on one that connected to the story of an overly protective widower trying to protect his children amid a calamity, while also delving into issues such as government surveillance, privacy invasions and related issues that are only more relevant five years later.
After the film was finished, Aiello’s regular distribution partner Universal took over the loans, acquiring the picture, then eventually licensed it to Amazon, which finally released it at the very end of July.
Amazon’s interest was, perhaps, unsurprising. One of the film’s key lesser characters is an Amazon Prime delivery guy, who has a crucial if appropriate role during the climax. That seeming product placement led to a lot of online snark when the film debuted, but Aiello said, “I’m glad we did what we did. It pissed everyone who was putting it down online. I was hoping people are more appreciative” about the role delivery people have in our daily lives, especially since the lockdown.
So what made the film such a hit on Amazon?
Timing made a difference, no doubt. The domestic box office for theatrical releases this summer looked early on like it was heading for a $4 billion take, but has faded considerably. After the latest limp-legged attempt to launch a Fantastic Four franchise, there wasn’t much in theaters (though Warner Bros. Discovery’s horror original Weapons is having an extremely nice run).
Amazon gave the new War very little marketing push, leading to Aiello to tap his old friend (and my neighbor) Lynda Dorf, a long-time entertainment publicity executive, to stir the pot at least minimally. That didn’t hurt.
And Amazon also didn’t have much of its own to distract its audiences. The genial political comedy Heads of State, with Idris Elba and John Cena, had owned the Amazon Prime screen for a month when War showed up, as something both different, and familiar enough with that name and those stars. And the rest is a sort of odd movie history.
Aiello won’t make any more money from the film’s continued success, at least not directly, though perhaps his next project will be more enthusiastically received, with or without an H.G. Wells or Bekmambetov connection.
Ice Cube, by the way, is having a good summer. Not only did he star in one of Amazon’s most popular films ever, he’s headlining a concert tour this summer, his first in more than a decade, called Truth to Power: 4 Decades of Attitude.
He even did a tour mashup with the Goodyear Blimp, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary, while celebrating a lfamous ine from one of Cube’s biggest hits, 1993’s chilling It Was a Good Day,: “Even saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp and it read, ‘Ice Cube’s a Pimp.” Cube’s home town of Compton, California is a couple of miles from what was the long-time mooring spot for Goodyear’s famous air ship.