“Ella McCay,” the new dramedy by James L. Brooks, arrived in theaters last weekend to a dismal $2 million off of a $35 million budget. If you’ve seen any headline about the movie, and let’s be honest, you haven’t, it’s that, but that shouldn’t be the story.
The story should be that “Ella McCay” is an extremely earnest reminder of the kinds of movies we used to get. Premise-less movies about people. It’s the kind of broad story that doesn’t even get shunted to streaming because there is nothing to market around.
It’s also letting an old master just make a modestly budgeted movie because it’s them behind the lens. James L. Brooks made 3 timeless, award winning classics in “Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News,” and “As Good As It Gets,” and even though his more recent (recent in quotes, he hasn’t made a movie in fifteen years) works were critical and financial disappointments, he has more than earned his right to keep making movies.
Disney happily wasted $1 billion on A.I. (the kind of faux-forward looking decision that will hurt Disney in the long run Bob Iger is famous for) and has lost hundreds of millions of dollars trying and failing to prolong or launch franchises like Indiana Jones and The Haunted Mansion yet nobody ever questioned why Disney produced those features.
We’ve seen many movies about hope this year from “Superman” to “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” but “Ella McCay” is the movie that conjured that feeling the most for me with the kind of film it is. With the sheer earnestness in its characters and story, no matter how misshapen and poorly calibrated it is, this is the kind of failure I want more of because it is additive to the world.
