579. Frame Rate: Infinity Pool (Feat. David Bell)

I was researching this as I wrote it. It might be interesting to look back at David Cronenberg movies, Brandon's seem much better than Stereo, Crimes Of The Future (unrelated to the 2022 one), and Shivers were. It's definitely not 1:1 because Brandon gets the access to some budget and available talent that David didn't get as quickly. David's 3rd film, Shivers, was made for the equivalent of ~$800,000 (in American dollars) and put him on the map because even though it was critically panned (and got David kicked out his apartment for violating a "morality clause" in his lease??) it became the most profitable Canadian film ever made at the time (1975) bringing in the current US equivalent of 4.5 million dollars. Brandon's FIRST film, Antiviral, was made for the equivalent of a little over 3 million (current US dollars), however it is also the LAST time a Brandon Cronenberg movie released any public budget information I can find, possibly because it only made like 90k (current US) at box office lol. It's feels safe to say Infinity Pool has a higher budget, but also has done much better at the box office with 5 million earned.. It seems clear that Brandon seems to have a bit more artistic pointedness than his father had with his early works, which isn't something budget necessarily gives you, and these last two are just pretty out-and-out better. David Cronenberg arguably starts getting like, good, when he makes The Brood in 1979 which is his 6th film. The Brood is good, but is still a little, uh, not as good as Possessor. After The Brood is David's Very Good Decade (tm), in order: Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone (lol), The Fly, Dead Ringers, and Naked Lunch. By another metric, David was 38-39 years old when he began Videodrome (after turning down an offer to direct RETURN OF THE JEDI?????!??), and Brandon was that same age when he started on Infinity Pool. I think we can agree that Videodrome is David's best(?) and it feels like Brandon is still getting started. Though I think generation names are useless, I do think we have been extending the development period for humans generally and I think that is generally a good thing, but that would make comparing people in their 30's in the 70's to people in their 30's in the 20's a little unreasonable. David made 6 movies in his first decade of features, and Brandon has made 3, but the long pause between his first two make that metric not feel like a perfect one either. If you subtract the year of 2020 the pause between Possessor and Infinity Pool is the same as the time between David's releases at the same point in his career from Shivers until the release of Videodrome. I think it'd be fair to give Brandon another 5 movies to get to Videodrome lol Based on these last two, and the current positive environment for horror, he'll keep getting opportunities and I'm glad for that and like you look forward to his development. Let's go Brandon lmao

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