Motion Capture has been around for a while now. Zmeckis pioneered it with the likes of the Polar Express. Andy Serkis made it convincing as Gollum and James Cameron reinvented the wheel with Avatar and turned it all the ways up to 11.
And as wonderful as the process is and I'm a big believer in the fact that it shouldn't be a genre, but history will decide that in years to come. Here lies the problem.
For years, actually almost since film began, movies have been sold on their stars. From Charlie Chaplin to Tom Cruise, people flock to the movies to see their favourite stars. And of course huge dinosaurs and spaceships help the overall experience, but people go for the stars. Hence many of them are the real box office. And are guaranteed to put bums in seats and put big smiles on the studio accountants.
So, bare with me here. Let's say we have a huge big blockbuster of a movie. And let's say the lead is a big robot, monster, whatever you want. And that lead, must be a mo capped character. Will the likes, just for arguments sake, of Tom Cruise don the mo cap suit and thunder around the screen as a giant mo capped robot?
Or would De Niro, Pitt, Clooney etc. do something similar. I believe they won't and here's why. As amazing as motion capture is, and while it is still the star putting in the performance, it's still not them on screen. It's the robot, monster whatever. It will devalue their "star". And the biggest problem is how the hell do you market a huge movie star as a motion captured robot?
Tom Cruise is the robot.
Doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? After all, if people want to see the Cruise machine on screen, they want to see him on screen. Not some mocapped digital representation of his performance. At the end of the day, the studios are there to make money and you can't make as much money off a movie star if they are not onscreen physically.
Think about it. People remember King Kong, people remember Gollum, people remember the Na'Vi. Tragically for the stars, their digital onscreen characters are all that are remembered. Nobody remembers Serkis or Saldana. Sure, the geeks do. That's what geeks do. But your average mainstream movie audience, they don't. They just remember Gollum was awesome, not Andy Serkis and his amazing mo capped performance. It’s the same, granted far more advanced, than the guy in the rubber suit back in the day! And we all remember those actors, don’t we?
So how will all this work? Or, has Hollywood even thought about this problem? Then again, Andy Serkis could just be incredibly busy for the rest of his career.
