HBO, which previously scored with its Beyonce concert special, and U2 have announced that they are partnering on two specials set to premiere in November. The first on November 7th will be a documentary going behind the scenes of the band’s current tour and “offering access to the band and team that worked with them on their current iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE world tour. It takes a look into the creation of the tour, which began May 14 in Vancouver and currently runs through November.” A week later, on Nov. 14th, HBO will air the band’s Paris concert from Bercy Arena which will actually take place on the same day. So, November would be a good time to borrow a family members’ HBO GO login information. Both specials will also be available on HBO Now.
U2 is one of the best rock bands around, but they’ve become widely loathed, with one South Park episode playfully suggesting that Bono is quite literally a walking piece of shit (if you’ve seen the episode you know that I did not just misuse the word “literally”). As Salon recently profiled:
Despite [Bono’s] fame and ability to hobnob and hold his own intellectually with world leaders, he’s never quite grown out of being a loudmouthed Irishman who’s cheerfully, proudly imperfect and always having to apologize for social gracelessness. Depending on the level of fandom, this personality trait is either entirely charming or totally irritating, which no doubt explains quite a bit about why U2 is such a polarizing band. But it’s rare that Bono’s intentions are malicious, which makes the scorn he and the band receive that much more tiring
Yes, U2 is the band who annoyed the world by daring to try and give them a free copy of their latest album through iTunes. Yes, Bono now has bleached-blonde hair for some reason, the Edge fell off the side of the stage on opening night of the current tour, and they recently let Jimmy Fallon come on the stage to play “Desire” with them in Madison Square Garden. This is also the band which suffered a big personal loss when their longtime tour manager, Dennis Sheehan, passed away in May while they were on tour in Los Angeles. This is also a band who have loads of classic songs and put on good concerts (based on my one time seeing them in person and loads of audio bootlegs).
For the purposes of this site, though, what’s maybe most interesting about all of this is what it says about the state of the feature-length concert film/music documentary because it was only 7 years ago that U2 actually put a concert movie into theaters, albeit in limited release and designed for IMAX. Who could forget about U2 3D?
I remember seeing that at my local theater with my best friend and fellow U2 fan along with, at most, 5 other random fans who also bought tickets that day. It was my first time seeing a concert movie in a theater, and it was a slightly odd viewing experience. At normal concerts, you don’t have to wear 3D glasses nor do you have Bono’s face jumping out at you at random intervals. Instead, you have fellow concertgoers around you dancing, singing and talking, all with the faint smell of marijuana smoke in the air. There must also be mandatory applause after every song. Not so much with U2 3D.
It only grossed $22m worldwide, $10.3m in the US/Canada, and in the time since then any concerts U2 have recorded have been released through their fanclub. That is, after all, what concert movies are – treats for the fans. Those treats are fewer and farther between lately, with the most prominent recent movies being 2013’s One Direction: This Is Us ($28m domestic), 2012’s Katy Perry: Part of Me ($25m dom.), 2011’s Justin Bieber: Never Say Never ($73m dom.), 2009’s Michael Jackson: This Is It ($72m) and 2009’s Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience ($19m). At some point along the way, Metallica also released their experimental Metallica Through the Never ($7.9m worldwide).
None of them are as revered as something like Martin Scorsese’s 1978 classic The Last Waltz, chronicling the supposed farewell show for The Band, or 1970’s Woodstock or that weird Led Zeppelin movie (The Song Remains the Same) or…you get the point. There used to be more of these things, although not as many as you might thing. It now feels like one of those things where the march of time has dictated that as music footage has become more accessible, with cell phones turning all of us into amateur documentarians at any show we see, a theatrically released concert film seems less special.
The older concert movies were more genuine fly-on-the-wall documentaries attempting to chronicle a moment in time or bizarre examples of drug-addled musicians pursuing confusing artistic impulses. Such movies also predated a time when we had multiple cable channels (MTV, VH1) ostensibly devoted to covering popular music and music culture, not that such channels really care about that anymore. Now, concert films are more like natural extensions of global marketing pushes for the biggest bands of the moment, with the only such films making it into theaters being for younger-skewing artists whose concerts are already multi-million dollar theatrical productions anyway. Outside of theaters, tons of bands release concert movies through fan clubs or simply let fans make their own with generous bootlegging policies at concerts because more and more bands desperately need free advertising for the quality of their concerts since they sure as hell aren’t making money off of their albums streaming on Spotify. And if you’re U2 you try something interesting with HBO, especially since that U2 3D experiment in 2008 and Rattle and Hum in the late 80s didn’t exactly strike gold.
Now, for no reason other than how many times I’ve written about Batman elsewhere on this site I’ll close with the music video for U2’s Batman Forever song “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”:
Source: THR
