So much for Peter Bart’s pet dead horse about the untraversable gap between ticket buyers and film reviewers––Iron Man, so far the year’s best reviewed film, is also thus far 2008’s fastest moneymaker. The critic/audience sync continued this past weekend with Speed Racer. It takes a rare film to unite critics with as disparate a sensibility as Anthony Lane and Armond White in common vitriol; it’s almost unthinkable that the same critically-despised film would fail to appeal to the masses.

“Speed Racer kills cinema,” went White’s fuming, unusable pullquote. But does it? It would be wishful thinking to assume that the average ticket buyer actually cares about “cinema”, never mind the death thereof, but it seems clear to me that the audience’s failure to care about this particular movie could have lasting repercussions for those of us who do take cinema seriously. After jump, you’ll find five reasons why, love the movie or hate it, this bombing could potentially be Bad For Movies on the whole––and one reason why it might be kind of good. As usual, feel free to tell me why I’m a moron in the comments.

1: Bad for Actors. Actors known for putting forth their most memorable performances in indie films (think John Goodman, Christina Ricci) tend to shore up their overall bankability by moonlighting in mainstream box office hits. This gives them a higher international profile which helps get their lower budget films greenlit. But when the same actors become associated with high-profile bombs, their usefulness to indie producers begins to erode. If Speed Racer had bombed in 1997, films like The Big Lebowski and Buffalo 66 might have looked very different; without a known quantity in the female lead, the latter might not have been made at all.
2. Bad for Brand-name Directors. - In the end, Speed Racer will probably make more money domestically than There Will Be Blood, but PTAs limited but devoted audience will guarantee that he gets free reign on his next pic. If auteurs can’t deliver hits when expected to, they lose their authority, and future freedom. Obviously, in this sense, the failure of Speed Racer is bad for the Wachowskis. But the fact that studios may be less likely to entrust known status quo-defying artistic innovators with major projects is bad for the whole industry––it means more Michael Bays making more Transformers.
3. Bad for Technological Experimentation in the Name of Aesthetics. In his negative review of Iron Man, Armond White complained that “there’s not a single beautiful image” in Jon Favreau’s film. He may be right–– Iron Man isn’t about beauty, it’s about power and energy and political metaphors vague enough to please most partisans. But Speed Racer is, above all else, eye candy. It’s the result of broken ground and broken rules in the name of aesthetic revolution. Maybe general audiences aren’t interested in visual pleasure, so maybe they won’t mind a lack of emphasis on beauty in the future development of CGI and special effects. But maybe they should.
4. Bad for Adaptations. If the one TV adaptation that takes real chances with form and content––again, whether you like the movie or not, you have to admit that it’s quite an embellishment on the shell of the 60s anime series that inspired it––dies horribly at the box office, is there any reason *not* to expect that all further adaptations will resemble Dukes of Hazard-style autopilot exercises in ironic nostalgia?

5. Bad for Kids Films. Goodbye, invention and innovation. Hello, Alvin and the Chipmunks Forever.

And the one potentially good thing about the bombing… Maybe the Wachowskis will be forced to go back to making films like Bound - movies about people, instead of about design schemes and machines.