The Treadmill

Yesterday, The Wrap reported that Obsession had become the first movie made for less than $1 million to make more than $500 million at the box office.

This is a good sign for movies, and a great omen for original ideas.

Further down the piece, it is reported that the movie's stars are now moving into the big time; Inde Navarrette (who is great in the movie) is set to play Rogue in a new X-Men movie and Michael Johnston has just been announced in the cast for Universal's remake of The Mummy. They're both good actors starting out in their careers and I am the last person to begrudge them a big pay day, but I can't help being a little glum that, presumably on the advice of their reps, they have used the springboard of an interesting, low-budget, outsider movie to vault right onto the treadmill of mainstream movies.

If these were honest choices, then great. But I suspect this was driven by reps with their eyes on ten percent of the biggest short-term deal they could find. It's hard to bemoan the lack of original movies coming out of Hollywood while at the same time celebrating two actors who now have the cachet to help interesting films get made instead get taken straight off the board and dumped into second-banana roles in franchise pictures.

I really hope they both do well and make interesting choices in their careers (it would be nice to think you can play Rogue and then go do something interesting, but the pressure to not "fall off the radar" will become quite intense). Equally, I hope that someday reps will go back to helping talent build interesting bodies of work over the long-term, rather than just pushing them into bland studio fodder for a quick payout.