In promoting her latest picture actor and producer Sandra Bullock has, while defending her modestly budgeted romantic comedy, attacked the major studios in Hollywood. Bullock makes the case that her film The Lost City (2022) will serve as a new kind of role model for Hollywood productions. Her idea is that films like The Lost City, a stand alone picture with no explicit tie to an established intellectual property, are just as up to the task of selling tickets as the latest Marvel movie.
Movies like The Lost City have traditionally, in recent years, only been able to find distribution on streaming platforms. Bullock’s film may well help to change that but it’ll be a very slow and gradual process. The fault in Bullock’s reasoning is that The Lost City isn’t really all that new. The Lost City follows in the footsteps of Romancing The Stone (1984); transporting the trappings of a Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) style adventure into the romantic comedy formula. Obviously The Lost City has to dress things differently for a contemporary audience, referencing The Lost City Of Z (2016) more than once, but it’s essentially the same.
The Lost City, like Marry Me (2022), attempts to tap into and exploit audiences’ nostalgia for the romantic comedies of the eighties through the early two-thousands. So while The Lost City may not be based on a video game, comic book, or novel it is based on a very familiar tried and true formula. Of course an argument could be made that this is true of most films but the artist’s behind those pictures don’t typically make contradictory claims quite so ardently.
Perhaps if The Lost City hadn’t been so mediocre things would look different. Which isn’t to say that The Lost City isn’t funny or charming, it just lacks any sense of irony or even subtle subversions. Ultimately Bullock and company do achieve their modest aims as entertainers by crafting a film that makes a safe space for idle diversions.
