SSC Film Studies

Clerks and mainstream movie comparison

When it comes to the economic success of movies, its safe to say that the ones that gross the most income come in the form of an expensive, high end blockbuster straight out of Hollywood. This is due to the fact that mainstream film audiences are drawn to high production budgets and big name stars on their screen. Only once in a blue moon, does an independent movie ever make it big in the film world. It has even less of a chance of acquiring a massive 'cult following' along the way, such as the movie Clerks did.

There are many differences between an extremely low budget independent film such as Clerks, and a Hollywood blockbuster. Using Avatar as an example, I will discuss the features and traits of blockbusters and 'indie' films.

The first major difference is obviously the budgets of the films. An indie film, by it's very name, must remain independent and not receive any form of income from production companies in order to remain 'indie'. This for the most part, leaving independent movie directors in a predicament due to the fact that they must then rely on their own money, internal funding, or donations in order to get the money they need to  produce and market the film. In the case of Clerks, the budget for the entire film was $27,575 which was mostly spent on rights to the songs used.

This is heavily juxtaposed with Avatar whose production budget was $425,000,000, most of which was spent on marketing and CGI. The difference with these budgets, apart from the massive size difference, is that Avatar was profusely backed by 20th Century Fox financially, so none of the money had to be provided by James Cameron himself. There is of course good and bad points to both methods. A good point for independent production being that any and all profits made can then be given solely to the creator and whom they wish to share it with. The bad point being that if the film takes in a loss over a profit, the creator has no back up and loses all the money.

The good point of a production company backing a project is that the creator, directors and producers feel none of the financial backlash personally if the film doesn't go to plan due to having none of their own money invested. However a bad point could be that if the film is a success, only a small amount of the money goes to the director whilst the rest gets spread out amongst the extensive cast and crew.

Other differences between Clerks and Avatar are things such as the way the cinematography is used. Clerks specifically is a film heavily reliant on witty dialogue to move the story along rather that amazing CGI effects and animated characters that Avatar uses. Most of Avatars success stems from the fact that it was a completely new cinema experience which used amazing graphics and CGI to entice the audience in, whereas Clerks success comes from its witty script and quirky characters which gathered up a fan base. Clerks manages to stay on track by using two shots and mid shots for the most part in order to keep the audience focused on the main characters and not to be distracted by anything else, showing how important the script is. Whilst on the other hand, Avatar uses wide shots and extreme wide shots frequently throughout the film. This is so the audiences attention is drawn to the incredible special effects rather than the actual story.

Another major difference between indie films and blockbusters in general is the type of story being told. Indie films tend to use more grounded stories that have a large element of realism in them in order to attract a nichè audience, whereas blockbusters tend to go for exaggerated, flamboyant fictional stories used to grab the audiences attention and appeal to everyone. I believe this is the main difference between the two genres as it truly creates the divide between their specific audiences.