The world’s eyes are on China tonight, as the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics begin. Odds are that even if you’re glued to the screen, nobody in Hollywood is. Sports movies are a dime a dozen, but if you’re looking for a film about Olympic gold, they’re few and far between. This afternoon while hanging around in the CB smoking lounge, we played the let’s list Olympics movies game. Or rather we tried to play it. We got only four movies deep, before we ran out of gas with Blades of Glory.
Hollywood just doesn’t make movies about the Olympics, and on the rare occasion that someone does they seem to be primarily about the winter version, or in the case of Munich, about events surrounding the Olympics, not the Olympics themselves. Cool Runnings is a nice movie, but if the Summer Olympics is really such a big deal, shouldn’t we have more movies about track and field? It’s not that no one makes good Olympic movies, it’s just that except for rare exceptions like Chariots of Fire, no one bothers to make them at all. What’s going on?
The answer I suspect, is fairly simple. Though the world market for movies is ever-growing, Hollywood still primarily makes pictures for Americans and, Americans do not care. Sure the Olympics will get plenty of attention in the media over here, and they may get decent enough ratings, but it’s not because we’re into the events.
Most of the Americans actually going through the trouble to watch are watching out of national pride, not because they’re really interested in the intricacies of the discus throw. Americans like team sports in which the team they’re rooting for is owned by some half-crazed billionaire, which perhaps explains why most of the Olympic movies which have been made usually focus on a team sport like hockey. I suppose Hollywood could do something with Olympic basketball, but America’s team is usually so much better than anyone else’s, there’s little to be had there in the way of cinematic drama.
What I’m getting at here is that it isn’t so much that Hollywood isn’t interested in making movies about the Olympics as that they’ve been smart enough to know Americans have absolutely no interest in watching them. It will be all NBC can do to get us watching for a week or two every four years. By the time it’s over, Americans will be more than ready to turn their attention back to corporately owned baseball or football. We’re only interested in individual drama if it involved violence. Punch a guy in the face, now that’s a sport. Watching a dude hanging from some rings in a unitard? No thanks. If the world wants Olympic drama, they’ll have to make the movies themselves. Hey Bollywood! Get a move on.
