Colin Miller, a law professor at John Marshall (Chicago), and a friend of (and occasional visitor to) the Lounge, asked me to make this post on his behalf:
It was recently announced that Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson will reunite for Shawn Levy’s “The Interns,” about friends who lose their sales jobs and decide to intern at a tech company to get back in the game. Although the comedy likely won’t be timeless, it should be timely given everything from Ross Perlin’s"Intern Nation" to the New York Times discussing how unpaid internships are becoming the de facto gateway to paid positions for today’s college grads.
The announcement of “The Interns” inevitably brought to mind the stillborn “Outsourced” project to which Wilson and Vaughn were attached in the 2005 afterglow of "Wedding Crashers" becoming the top grossing R-rated comedy of all time. That project would have seen the two funnymen starring as downsized workers going south of the border to get back their outsourced jobs. The “Outsourced” project would have been prescient, but not for the reason that you might think.
The “Outsourced” project seemed like a no-brainer after “Wedding Crashers” broke box office records.
It’s even less surprising to claim today that movies are America’s top export than it was in 1998. The United States and Canada accounted for a shade under 50% of worldwide box office at the turn of the century; by 2011, their piece of the pie had shrunken to 31%. When "The Hangover" supplanted “Wedding Crashers” as the top grossing R-rated comedy, it did so by a mere 32.5% domestically. But overseas, “Hangover” outgrossed “Crashers” by an astonishing 150.5%. 2 years’ later, Todd Phillips’ carbon copy sequel left its predecessor in its dust, more than doubling its foreign receipts.
That sequel was filmed in Thailand, which makes sense, given that the film was about one night in Bangkok. But since 1997, the percentage of films that take place in the States and yet are shot elsewhere has multiplied. From 1980-1997, motion picture and “service activities in Los Angeles County grew at a rate of 194% for employment and 248% for businesses." But from 1997-2007, the number of shooting days in Los Angeles decreased nearly 40%. So, why did 1997 represent the turning point and the start of a literal tectonic shift that has seen studios outsource the production of countless movies just as companies have done with their production of innumerable other commodities?
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