Hi everybody, are you sick of Frozen yet?
Well I hope your not, because this summer, disney will bring back one of their most famous franchises of all time in a special short film called 'Frozen Fever', probably because their remake of Cinderella will bomb at the box office if it doesn't. So for kids and child minded adults around the world this is probably the best news you've heard all day. For me, its less so.Now before you start typing your angry death threat email towards me, let me say upfront that I don't hate this movie, but at the same time its not the greatest film disney has ever come out with. I think its characters are well put together, the animation is smooth and great to look at and the overall plot is decent at best. So why am I not excited for this? Well its a little thing I like to call 'The backlash effect'.
This repercussion usually happens when a film becomes so popular with its audience that people don't stop talking, singing and praising the film for years, this causes people like me to start tearing our hair out in insanity, and frozen is a big example of that. Even after more than a year from its release, you still see the movies merchandise in every shop window, you can still hear people singing the songs from the soundtrack over and over. Which then results in people saying its over hyped, over praised and that the movie itself isnt even that good to begin with, which in this movies case in my opinion isn't true. So this leads to the ultimate question, can a good film be destroyed by its popularity?
Now this isn't the first time we've seen something like this before. When Skyfall was released it was a massive success with its audience and critics, but after a while people started getting tired of the popularity and that had the same effect. The same goes to Slumdog Millionaire, it used to be admired by anyone who saw it but now people just want to forget about it. Perhaps this is because the original enjoyment of the product came from the fact that no one knew about it. Slumdog Millionare used to be the small independent film that only those critics and fans of Danny Boyle would know about, but when it won big at the oscars, everyone knew about it and it lost its sense of mystery. So when the film became more well known, it became less personal to the viewer, but this doesn't change the film itself since its still an incredible movie.
This is also the same with adaptations of books. For example, when The Hobbit was released in cinemas I didn't know what to think of it. Sure the visual where stunning and it was a treat for the Tolkin geeks, but the idea that I read the books before, made the idea of reading the story less rewarding. Back when the hobbit films did not exist, it would be quite a shock to find someone else or also read it as well, and it would be that much rewarding when you find someone else to talk about them with. Now however, everyone has seen the hobbit films and everyone knows the story. This makes the idea of knowing the story of The Hobbit less rewarding since everyone knows about it now.So it seems that while hype and over exposure can help a movie, it can also bring it down too. This affects us in ways that we are not even aware of, by changing our thoughts on a film even if the movie itself hasn't changed at all. But this usually happens with any film that is popular whether it be good or bad. So really, there's always going to be a film that people would obsess over for a while, just pray that its something worth watching. I would rather see a really good popular film like Frozen over a really bad popular film like Transformers.
So in the end hype can sometimes make a film annoying, but we are always going to go through a love and hate relationship over anything that's popular. But if your going to be sick of something you're going to see everywhere, just hope that its something that you enjoyed to begin with.
