The inverse cost and quality law attempts to formalize any Hollywood cinema production characterized by a large budget and, by negative correlation, poorly perceived critical attributes. American writer David Foster Wallace coined the term and established the genre's attributes, symptoms or diagnostic features in a 1998 article titled, "F/X Porn" by which Wallace primarily critiques the weaknesses of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), a blockbuster film directed by James Cameron.
Overview
David Foster Wallace, in a 1998 essay which first appeared in Waterstone's Magazine and was later anthologized in the essay collection Both Flesh and Not, posited that Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the archetype or apotheosis of the inverse cost and quality law:
"'T2' is thus also the first and best instance of a paradoxical law that appears to hold true for the entire F/X Porn genre. It is called the Inverse Cost and Quality Law, and it states very simply that the larger a movie's budget is, the shittier that movie is going to be. The case of "T2" shows that much of the ICQL's force derives from simple financial logic. A film that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make is going to get financial backing if and only if its investors can be maximally – maximally – sure that at the very least they will get their hundreds of millions of dollars back – i.e. a megabudget movie must not fail (and "failure" here means anything less than a runaway box-office hit) and must thus adhere to certain reliable formulae that have been shown by precedent to maximally ensure a runaway hit."
Despite the dislike by Wallace, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is critically acclaimed. It won four Academy Awards, and review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports 92% positive reviews.
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