Boxoffice Pro Issues its Forecast for Captain America 4's Opening

I previously estimated that Captain America 4's worldwide box office gross would be well short of that of the third film from 2016 even in current dollars, and that the tracking-based estimate for the opening weekend, positing a gross of some $86-$95 million in the first three days in the domestic market, suggests the film's finishing with $500-$600 million taken in worldwide as the most probable outcome.

Boxoffice Pro had then not yet put out its own forecast (these days they do so just three, rather than four, weeks in advance of a film's release), but they have their estimate out now--some $70-$85 million for the three day period, as reported almost two weeks closer to the release date. Assuming the same combination of legs in the domestic market, and a commensurate international response, as I forecast in the prior piece, this implies a range of more like $400-$500 million.

Boxoffice Pro's assessment says nothing about a decline in expectations, but all the same, their figure's being even lower, and that with just three weeks to go until the movie's debut, reaffirms the impression that this is not what the backers of this movie need given the film's $350 million+ cost for production alone, and Marvel Cinematic Universe's combination of a shaky market position and big plans now. Indeed, between the price tag for the movie (implying a need for a gross of $600 million or more for the backers to just break even given the structuring of revenues), the billion-dollar hit that Captain America 3 was in current dollars, the (almost) billion-dollar hit that Captain America 2 was in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, the billion dollar hit that Deadpool also was, and the public relations importance of the billion-dollar mark generally these days, it seems that nothing much short of--you guessed it--a billion dollars will do given the need of the MCU to show that Marvel's really back (for all its success, Deadpool & Wolverine was too idiosyncratic a film to prove that by itself). The result is that nothing short of a great "overperformance" relative to the current expectations will save the day here, with all that implies for the franchise in which the relaunch of Captain America is so important an element.

For Your Consideration: Some Thoughts on the 2025 Oscar Nominees

After being twice-delayed by the not-so-minor matter of the climate change-intensified fires devastating a large part of Los Angeles county (and sending a good many of the more literate observers of current events back to their copies of Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear as those who sneered at Davis' "apocalypticism" prove themselves complete and utter morons for the umpteenth time) the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally released its list of the nominations for its 2025 awards ceremony.

Can we speak of any really great surprises here, with regard to really surprising snubs or really unexpected honors? Comparing Variety's comprehensive predictions about the nominees list (a safe index, I think, of entertainment industry Establishment opinion) to the list we eventually got I see that in the Best Picture category Variety correctly forecast eight of the ten nominees, while also getting right three of the five directing nominees, sixteen of the twenty acting nominees, and eight of the ten writing nominees as well--thirty-five of the forty-five in total for a 78 percent average across the board, and 80 percent in seven of the eight categories. Meanwhile, where the nominees Variety did not guess correctly are concerned a significant number were a matter of some Best Picture nominee snatching the spot away from a less-lauded film--as with A Complete Unknown getting the Best Director and Best Supporting Actress nods that Variety had predicted going to the un-nominated All We Imagine as Light and The Last Showgirl, while Emilia Pérez landed the Best Actress nod they thought would go to Hard Truths.

In short, real surprises were few in number. Fans of this film or that actor may complain about a snub, but all the same, it is part of the ceremony's politics that it spreads the prizes around, such that (simply for a start) if some expected Jamie Lee Curtis to get at least a nomination for her supporting role in Showgirl the fact that she won a statue in that exact category two years earlier worked against that--just as Denzel Washington's nine nominations and two wins meant that giving him another nomination for a Gladiator II no one expected to see in the running for much in the way of the bigger prizes is not some great shock. And this is only as expected given last year's thinned-out slate of films, which was as light on obvious award contenders as it was on obvious blockbusters (recall how at the year's start many thought that not one movie would make the billion-dollar mark), such that we did not see any movies with very large and vocal popular lobbies to compare with "Team Barbie" and its coronation of "their" movie as Best Picture in July, and their subsequent shock and anger when the movie got less than they felt was coming to it. Indeed, as David Walsh, who can be counted on for a rare forthrightness in these matters, put it, "It is difficult to point to important films that were slighted or ignored, because there were so few of those this year."

The result is that pretty much the only exception to the predictability is Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong getting acting nods in the otherwise overlooked The Apprentice. I will leave it to others to parse whether these nominations are a matter of well-deserved recognition for work well done, protest gesture, or a mix of the two, but it does seem to me fair to say that on the whole the slate was less impressive for the political content of its films than last year's, when the historical drama Oppenheimer and the socially critical Poor Things together swept up most of the principal awards--save in the area of identity and gender politics, as such movies as Emilia Pérez and The Substance make clear. Of course, as those familiar with his writing would expect, Walsh sees the themes of those films as going hand in hand with the lack of "expression in Hollywood films" of "the most pressing questions in American life"--and what others have called the "corporate wokeness" supposedly in retrograde still alive and well among those who make films with an eye to winning critical laurels.

The Drama Over It Ends With Us Just Isn't Ending

Remarking It Ends With Us from the standpoint of its box office prospects last summer I saw the film as worth discussing for two reasons--namely what it may indicate about the prospects for translating bestsellers into cinematic blockbusters (shakier these days, I think, for some telling and important reasons), and for what seemed to me Hollywood's most viable way forward, making movies with a deep appeal to a slice of the audience (while holding the budget down) rather than aiming at something mildly appealing to the broad public (and hoping this will permit a meaningful profit on a colossal outlay). Consistent with my expectations on both counts the movie was not a record-crushing box office behemoth, but it showed every evidence of proving very profitable on the basis I discussed (the $25 million production pulling in over $350 million globally, almost as much as the $200 million Twisters, with all that implies for the profit margin).

Of course, that was not an analysis in which Hollywood, or its courtiers in the entertainment press, were much interested, insistent as they are on sticking to business as usual (such that there was far more interest in the box office success of Ends With Us star Blake Lively's husband's movie Deadpool as validating their preferences--very questionably as that movie's success too can seem to be a triumph won by appealing deeply to a specific demographic). Now the box office success of the movie, and whatever implications it may have for the industry, are also being overshadowed by the legal war between the costars, the associated enterprises and everyone else somehow caught up in this (the length of which list of personages may be as absurd as it is frightening).

This scandal/legal battle is the kind of thing I usually try to avoid writing about--and would have not even acknowledged here were it not for the fact that I had taken such an interest in the film's box office performance and its implications, and frankly, the role of the New York Times in this mess. I make no pretense to sorting out the claims and counterclaims of Ms. Lively and Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Baldoni et. al.. However, I certainly think it possible to say something about the paper's conduct--for if the Times' handling of such affairs is far from the most serious of the malfeasance on which they engage on a daily basis, the paper, like the rest of the mainstream media, displays its worst tendencies when faced with the mix of celebrity, scandal and sex, while it is harder and harder to dismiss this malfeasance as mere tabloid crap given the way such forces have exploited the cultural politics generally involved in them.

Considering the Times' jumping into the fray with its December 21, 2024 story "'We Can Bury Anyone': Inside a Hollywood Smear Machine" accusing Mr. Baldoni of having deployed such a "smear machine" against Ms. Lively from that perspective I will not say that the paper has necessarily wronged Mr. Baldoni. But as Theodore Dreiser reminded his readers again and again not only the media's blatant lies but its highly selective truth-telling as well are apt to align with other agendas less obvious to the public. In this case what seems to be going on is that the Times hastened to seize on (yet another) Hollywood harassment scandal because it fit in with, and seemed to reinforce, the now eight year old (and recently flagging) #MeToo campaign. (Indeed, it seems relevant that Megan Twohey, who coauthored one of the two pieces on Harvey Weinstein that got the ball rolling, had the byline on this one too.) And however sincere others may be about the campaign's causes, the fact remains that for the media this has been above all a matter of pouring gasoline on the flames of the neverending kulturkampf, their doing which has gone into overdrive since the election this past November. Escalating their longtime gaslighting of the American public with smarmy "You've never had it so good" so "Don't worry, be happy" propaganda, and slighting the historic mismanagement of the Democratic Party's dumpster fire of a campaign (indeed, such mismanagement that some suspect still worse than mere mismanagement here), they sell the narrative that the outcome last November "It Wasn't the Economy, Stupid" in part by insisting that it was instead about the very divisions in the country whose exacerbation they pursue so relentlessly to divert that part of the public they cannot fool from the hard realities of the twenty-first century.

What Will Captain America 4 Make at the Box Office? (Update)

I previously suggested a range of $750 million-$1.2 billion as the likely gross for a fourth Captain America film entirely on the basis of the performance of prior Captain America and MCU films--if only as a starting point for thinking about the matter. However, we now have the first publicly available tracking-based estimates, which apparently project an opening weekend gross of $86-$95 million for the movie in the North American market (with the Friday-Sunday period in mind, the following Monday holiday not counted in).

Of course, a great deal can happen in the month between the publication of this estimate, and the movie's release (as the collapse of The Flash and the surging of Barbie both showed in the summer of 2023). Still, for the time being let us work with the numbers we have, and apply to them the combination of two multipliers--namely the multiplier we should use to extrapolate the full domestic run from the opening weekend, and the multiplier we should apply to the expected domestic run to get the likely worldwide take.

As it happens the MCU's movies tend to have fairly front-loaded grosses in North America. None has taken in there more than 3.6 times (or less than 1.8 times) its opening weekend gross. At the same time the movies do tend to be strong international performers, with the range here extending from a 55/45 split to a 31/69 split in the domestic/international gross, giving us another multiplier of between 1.8 and 3.2. Between the two we can broadly expect a Marvel movie to make globally between 3.3 times and 11.6 times its North American opening weekend gross. A fairly big range, if we go with the more typical 2-3 times its opener the movies usually make in their domestic run, and consider as precedents both Captain America 2 (given Captain America 3's exceptional nature as a Phase Three quasi-Avengers movie), and Black Panther 2 (given both its having to come after the gigantic preceding film and that it is the only movie where the persona was filled by a new character and actor), between which we get multipliers for the worldwide gross of 1.9 to 2.8, we end up with a narrower range of from 3.3-11.6 to 3.8-8.4. Safely assuming a middle-of-the-road performance with regard to the movie's domestic legs, and its international relative to its domestic response, we get a combined multiplier between 5.5 and 6.1. This works out to a gross of $325-$800 million for the global take at the outside, with the mid-range figure $470-$580 million--which, frankly, feels intuitively plausible to me. What we make of this as a performance may be another matter, however.

What Will Captain America: Brave New World (aka Captain America 4) Make at the Box Office? (Preliminary Estimate)

It seems safe to say that the release of Captain America: Brave New World (aka Captain America 4) will be a crucial test of the continued viability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the superhero genre, and the blockbuster generally--which makes it well worth considering how the film is likely to do after hitting theaters this Valentine's Day weekend.

A reasonable place to begin such a consideration is the track record of the series to date. For this purpose I present the domestic, international and worldwide grosses for the series' three films below in both current dollars, and with the prices of the month of release adjusted for November 2024 prices (the latter figure presented in the parentheses).

Captain America--The First Avenger
Domestic: $177 million ($247 million) International: $194 million ($271 million) Worldwide: $371 million ($518 million)

Captain America--The Winter Soldier
Domestic: $260 million ($346 million) International: $455 million ($606 million) Worldwide: $714 million ($950 million)

Captain America--Civil War
Domestic: $408 million ($536 million) International: $745 million ($978 million) Worldwide: $1.153 billion ($1.514 billion)

Simply going by the average of the three films one would expect a Captain America movie to make a little under a billion dollars--while going by the precedent of the third film one would expect the movie to make considerably more than a billion dollars.

However, simply going by these figures ignores the reality that 2025 is a long way away from 2016--and that the grosses of the MCU's films have trended downward significantly since then in ways reflecting structural changes in the market for films. Most obviously there has been the (still ongoing) pandemic's effect on movie attendance. (Where before the pandemic North Americans were still buying 3-4 movie tickets per capita, in 2022-2024 the figure was closer to 2.) There has also been the blow dealt Hollywood by its diminished access to the Chinese market, which matters the more with the MCU because of how popular it was in that market. (The franchise cleared $1 billion in China in 2019 alone, with Avengers: Endgame alone taking in over $600 million, an extraordinary sum for any movie in any market, let alone an American release in one foreign market--and that's just not happening again anytime soon.)

All of this was evident in the way that the four MCU films that came out between July 2022 and May 2023 (Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Ant-Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy 3) suffered drops in their real-terms, inflation-adjusted gross compared to their direct predecessors from Phase Three of about 20 to 50 percent. The bigger the prior movie had been, the bigger the drop tended to be (as seen in the difference between the third Guardians' 20 percent fall, and the drop of half suffered by the second Black Panther). Granted, the two follow-up films, The Marvels and Deadpool, did not perform this way--The Marvels seeing a catastrophic collapse in its gross of more like 85 percent compared to the successful original Captain Marvel, whereas Deadpool & Wolverine saw a great improvement in its gross, bettering the original Deadpool's take by about thirty percent (and in the process, producing the greatest hit, in real terms, in the whole history of the X-Men/Deadpool franchise). However, both those films were each in their way anomalous in their subject matter and the audience response to it (both of them ostentatiously postmodernist and more than-usually-comedic team-ups of characters from different parts of the Marvel franchise, if with the difference that Nia DaCosta's bringing together Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau simply was not the hit-maker that Shawn Levy's teaming up of Deadpool and Wolverine proved to be this past summer). By contrast Captain America 4, if perhaps more ambitious than many other recent MCU efforts, seems to be at bottom a "normal" superhero movie, such that it seems reasonable to rely on the Thor 4-Black Panther 2-Ant-Man 3-Guardians of the Galaxy 3 sequence as a relevant precedent. Given that Captain America 3 grossed $1.5 billion in today's terms, this implies a range of $750 million-$1.2 billion, with the fact that it was one of the franchise's biggest successes--precisely because its plot and casting made it a quasi-Avengers movie in the period of the franchise's peak of popularity--so that I would guess that the fall in Captain America's 4 gross would be closer to the bottom end of the range than the top on the basis of their very limited information. We will, of course, have a better basis for such a judgment when the tracking-based estimates start coming in.

Revisiting Screen Rant's Box Office Forecasts for 2023's Superhero Films

Recently revisiting the matter of the box office performance of The Flash I also revisited Screen Rant's forecasts back in early 2023 for the box office grosses of the eight live-action Marvel and DC superhero films scheduled for release that year, seven of which actually did hit theaters before December 31 (all but Kraven the Hunter). Anticipating that three of the movies would break the billion-dollar barrier (Ant-Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Aquaman 2), a gross just short of that for one more ($950 million for Captain Marvel 2), not too much less for still another ($700 million for The Flash), and something even for the weaker DC heroes ($450 million for Shazam 2, $400 million for Blue Beetle), altogether the expectation was of the seven movies taking in some $5.7 billion altogether.

Every single one of these predictions proved overoptimistic, in many cases grossly so. Not one of these movies even approached the billion-dollar barrier, let alone broke it. The closest was Guardians of the Galaxy 3, with $845 million--against the $1.2 billion Screen Rant forecast for it, as all of the others were subject to charges of significant underperformance, and altogether those movies ended up making some $2.5 billion--not quite half the figure forecast for them. Unsurprisingly most probably lost money, with two of them in fact topping the chart of the year's biggest flops (The Flash and Captain Marvel 2).

As this suggests 2023 was a terrible year for conventional blockbusters, with that longtime king of the blockbuster the superhero film suffering particularly badly. The following year, 2024, did not go as badly as some feared--but then its slate was a lot thinner. Rather than five first-rank Marvel/DC superhero films such as we had in 2023, there was just one, Deadpool & Wolverine--and that, I stress again, a highly idiosyncratic movie whose success, while undeniable, does not necessarily prove that "Marvel's back!" the way the occupants of the executive suites and their courtiers in the entertainment press would like everyone to believe. The results with respect to the "lessons" of 2023 were thus less conclusive than they might be. However, with Captain America 4 mere weeks away and two more Marvel Cinematic Universe films following it in the next half year, all as DC gets its relaunch with a new Superman film, we will see this year whether 2023 was an unhappy anomaly, or revealed the "new normal" of the box office.

Why Has Deadpool Been Such a Hit with its Core Demographic?

While Ryan Reynolds claimed Deadpool & Wolverine was a 4-quadrant hit, the reality seems to be that the movie was overwhelmingly a hit in one demographic area, skewing male and young--even by superhero film standards.

The fact has not got much publicity, unsurprisingly in light of the associated cultural politics. The conventional wisdom holds that audiences which are the opposite--not male, not young--are grossly underserved by Hollywood, such that when a supposedly rare movie seen as playing to a different audience "finally" hits theaters and appears to make any money at all (perhaps marginally, perhaps not even that) there is much crowing about the fact, and the movie held up as an object lesson in how well Hollywood could be doing if it paid those other demographics more attention. The success of a movie on the terms on which Deadpool succeeded, of course, is not consistent with that narrative, and slighted accordingly.

Still, the fact that a movie scored big by appealing to a slice of the audience very deeply rather than being aimed at everybody a little bit seems to me worth remarking as consistent with the way Hollywood "hit-making" has been going in this period of reduced moviegoing (it's been just 2 ticket sales per capita in North America in 2022-2024, vs. 3-4 before the pandemic) and failing longtime strategies (Hollywood's offering very little we haven't seen a million times before).

That makes the way in which it appealed worth a word. The Deadpool sequel, like its predecessor the marriage of such indie movie crapola with an A-list-adjacent superhero in a way that James Gunn would probably have loved to give audiences but never quite got the chance to do, appealed to its audience on the basis of nihilism, flippancy, metafiction and "transgression" with results likely to be repulsive or trite to the grown-up but exercise a powerful influence on the minds of those not quite so grown-up but pretending to be--and accordingly had potential to be a hit with "the 18-24s" on that level. This was all the more the case because of a difference in the kind of superhero film they grew up with as against what their elders knew. For those superhero fans who came of age in, for example, the '90s, watching the films and shows of the Crow and Spawn and Blade franchises (among others), and more generally accustomed to foul-mouthed, blood-soaked action movies, while remembering all too well that '90s indie movie spirit, that '90s irony, and perhaps too its manifestations in such comedies as (the underrated) Mystery Men, Deadpool may not be so special--but on those whose frame of reference is defined by straightforward, usually earnest, PG-13 spectacles such as Marvel offers, it made an impression. All that did not rule out interest from other groups--but all the same, they were less likely to be so great a part of the hardcore fan base for the franchise as the younger cohort.

No, Deadpool & Wolverine Was (Probably) Not a 4-Quadrant Film

Those who become familiar with the entertainment industry press also become familiar with the entertainment industry's jargon--or less kindly, its buzzwords, of which I think we are hearing more and more in the mainstream these days. One such buzzword is the "four quadrant movie," based on a gender-and-age division of the audience into the four "quadrants" of males over 25, males under 25, females over 25, females under 25.

In considering this conception of the market one should remember that the idea is to really appeal to all four groups, rather than appeal to one demographic which drags others with them (for instance, movies that appeal to children who make their parents take them when they would otherwise never see the movie, or, to invoke a recent stereotype, women wanting to see Barbie and dragging their husbands and boyfriends along, and reportedly ending many a relationship in the process).

Those who make movies commonly hope to attract the widest possible audience, aspiring to interest moviegoers across the entire range of age and gender--and those whose movies fail to do so lament the fact. For example, the backers of the last Bond movie No Time to Die were dismayed by the lack of interest among the young in the movie (a factor in the movie's relatively weak box office performance), while more recently Andy Muschietti told Variety that The Flash "failed to be a 4-quadrant movie."

However, a movie need not be a 4-quadrant film to make a billion dollars, as Deadpool & Wolverine showed. As those familiar with the material would expect, and those familiar with the fan base for the Deadpool character in particular would guess, the audience for the franchise skews both young, and male, and very sharply too, with the data about the ticket-buyers confirming this. At least in the early part of the movie's run 62 percent of the audience was male, and 37 percent in the age 18-24 range alone, numbers suggesting anything but really broadly distributed interest across the four quadrants, whatever Ryan Reynolds may claim about the matter.

In spite of that the movie was the highest-grossing live-action movie of 2024, defying the constriction of the market to gross a staggering $600 million in North America (and $1.3 billion globally).

That seems to me important not simply for analyzing Deadpool's success, but because it seems to affirm what I think is the trend in the bottom line of films based on what I have been seeing since 2023 especially--that in a time in which people are going to the movies less (the North American public averages 2 movie tickets a year now, rather than 3 or 4), and Hollywood's bread and butter offerings are pretty well exhausted, trying to appeal to a very broad audience is likely to work less well than appealing very strongly to a narrower section of the public (whether that section conforms to the bounds of the 4-quadrant division or not).

Andy Muschietti Gets in his Two Cents on The Flash's Failure

Apparently the press is still talking about the colossal failure of Andy Muschietti's DC superhero film The Flash.

The director of the movie, explaining the matter in Hollywood insider terms in a story from Variety, talked about The Flash not being the "four quadrant movie" that supposedly any movie financed at that level has to be in order to turn a profit.

Getting a little more substantive than this tossing about of buzzwords he remarked "that a lot of people just don’t care about the Flash as a character."

Of course, anyone could have told Mr. Muschietti that--and indeed, before the breathless hyping of the movie as "the greatest superhero movie ever made" completely confused things back in the spring of 2023 the more astute box office analysts had less buoyant expectations for the film than they would have for, for example, a Batman or Superman film. (Thus did the comparatively optimistic folks at Screen Rant who thought Ant-Man 3 would be a billion-dollar hit, Guardians of the Galaxy do better and The Marvels fall just short of a billion expected just $700 million for The Flash.)

However, this mattered the more for a host of reasons Mr. Muschietti did not raise. Yes, there is the "Ezra Miller problem," and yes, there is the way the "greatest superhero movie ever made" hype probably backfired, but there are also the more structural matters--not least the audience's longtime lukewarmness toward the DC Extended Universe, all as The Flash had the misfortune of hitting theaters in a much tighter market than before (again, moviegoing down by a third relative to the pre-pandemic period) in which even more promising material was underperforming badly (as those three Marvel Cinematic Universe films did relative to the expectations for them), with the reality of superhero fatigue not helping.

Of course, just as Mr. Muschietti did not raise these aspects of the issue, neither did the writers at Variety, nor those other media outlets retailing the remarks--who as courtiers to the industry's kings cannot be expected to be very attentive to these inconvenient facts.

How High Will the Box Office Go in 2025?

With the end of the year we are seeing not just the inevitable analyses of the now concluded year of 2024, and predictions for 2025.

For its part Boxoffice Pro anticipates a $9-$10 billion take for the year.

If the first half of the year or so plays like 2023, and the second half like 2024, this does not seem out of the question. Still, it is a far cry from the $11-$12 billion that was the 2015-2019 norm in current dollars, let alone the $14-$15 billion to which that range was equal when we adjust for today's prices, and confirmation that the market's shrinkage by a rough third from its pre-pandemic level seems an enduring fact of life. The result is that there seems to me no great surprise here--all as, given the number of big movies coming out this year (compared with 2024, when the movie that opened the summer was The Fall Guy), there seems a good chance of 2025 having a 2023-like number of big loss-makers.

The Politics of the Silver Age Marvel Comics

Amid all the talk of the politics of Marvel's films it seems worth saying a word of the politics of the original comics that were their basis--the '60s-era first numbers that gave us the Marvel universe's iconic characters.

Having read them in the good old Marvel Essentials volumes that made them conveniently available for 21st century readers, I would say that Marvel's politics were "centrist"--subscribing to the essentially conservative, staunchly Anti-Communist, view that prevailed in that era (and has never ceased to dominate American life since, even after the supposed "end of history"), but in contrast with the right that was the principal alternative taking the view that existing institutions had to be made to "work for everyone." Thus in Marvel's pages the Commies were endlessly infiltrating, spying on, plotting against America and the Free World, and Marvel celebrating the good fight against them--so much so that scant years after Dwight Eisenhower himself warned the country about the dangers posed to its the "military-industrial complex" to the nation's "liberties or democratic processes" in his Farewell Address Stan Lee and Jack Kirby made a latterday Edisonade hero out of the very embodiment of that military-industrial complex in Tony Stark/Iron Man (in his first appearance, making his personal contribution to a war effort in Vietnam they obviously supported, at least at the time). Yet one can also acknowledge that Marvel's X-Men were unquestionably a call for tolerance and inclusion--and warned of the dangers of society failing its minorities (with intolerance drawing forth intolerance in the form of Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants).

Of course, the center did not quite hold over the years that followed, and just as American movies of the day reflected the change, so did Marvel comics, with more pointedly leftward stories appearing, and some stories taking a more sharply right-wing tone. Thus did Captain America in the wake of Watergate face down Richard Nixon. But thus did we also see the story of the Hulk, who might seem a natural Anti-Establishment figure as a patriotic scientist whose life was destroyed by the nuclear arms race in which he participated and ruthlessly persecuted by the state he had served in the form of a caricature of a General, go in the extreme opposite direction, with the Hulk facing down not Nixon but anti-war protesters presented as no-good hippie punks stupidly menacing Bruce Banner's kindly old mentor in their loyalty to their wrong-headed cause, while taking their cue from Tom Wolfe shortly thereafter going in for a sneer at so-called "radical chic" by making the Hulk another "cause" for the Upper East Side crowd (with, of course, Mr. Wolfe and his white suit actually visible in one panel).

Still, in the center Marvel began, and to the center it has generally tended, with it seeming to affirm rather than refute this that the rancor over the politics of Marvel's films has most had to do with their identity politics--for in spite of much mislabeling it is not the left but the center which has embraced such politics in the manner fueling the culture wars of today.

The Comedy of Michel Barnier

France's political crisis doesn't seem to get much attention in the American press these days, but even so it continues.

The part of the rather tangled affair relevant to this post is that after Emmanuel Macron, in another display of his extreme incompetence (or duplicity) as a politician, forced an early election that actually left him in a weaker position than before from the standpoint of his backing in the country's legislature, and his ability to push through the unpopular "reforms" (read: neoliberal program) on which he is so bent, went on to further inflame much of French public opinion by giving those who had voted for the leftward grouping in parliament two middle fingers by forming a government with the right, in spite of its having had fewer votes and seats than they (and the not insignificant fact that they were far from wholly on board with his program). Having created this mess, Macron then appointed one Michel Barnier to the Prime Ministership.

In line with the magical thinking to which adherents of conventional wisdom are prone, they imagined that Barnier would somehow make the reforms Macron is determined to have get through parliament. Certainly the portion of the mainstream American press covering the matter, talking up Barnier as they generally do anyone who looks to them the part of an "experienced" right-wing Establishment politician--especially when his task is brutalizing working people--were ready to attribute to the man in question such powers.

Reality being what it is he Monsieur Barnier did not achieve the expected miracle, and a vote of no confidence resulted in his replacement in the post and the impossible task France's President had set before him after the shortest Prime Ministership in the history of the Fifth Republic.

Reporting on that Politico titled its piece "The Tragedy of Michel Barnier"--that choice of word, "tragedy," bespeaking such courtiers of the elite's tendency to ennoble figures like Barnier in line with the old classical view that stories which see the powerful defeated are stories of "great men" done in by still greater forces than they, whereas the miseries of mere commoners are low comedy about fools getting exactly what they deserve. However, anyone of rational, modern, humane mind (I know, you don't see too many of these in the press, or on the Interweb for that matter) should be able to see in these elite hijinks the low comedy--and the tragedy in what is being inflicted by them on the people of France, Europe, and the world.

What Champions of Liberal Arts Education Don't Want to Admit

I am personally mindful of the value of a "liberal arts education"--an education which in one way or another stresses languages, the humanities, the social sciences, the arts. I even see them as having a "practical" value. There is no field where individuals do not benefit from enhanced reading, writing, critical thinking skills--and these courses are all well-known to offer a stronger training in that than any alternative would, all while conferring more specific benefits, with the sciences exemplary. After all, as Carroll Quigley remarked, science is nothing but a method--and the method ultimately derived from epistemological, philosophical, inquiry--with recent examination of the problems of medical research, for example, turning up the difficulty trained scientists have designing experiments properly simply because of the shortcomings of their grasp of the method, and the philosophy underlying it, in a reminder that while some sneer at the subject, scientists have a very practical need for philosophical training in order to do their jobs as well as they might.

Yet at the same time we have to acknowledge the hard facts that:

1. Students in college are, understandably, less eager for years of (very expensive) schooling than to get on in the world, and when push comes to shove see such subjects being required to spend four years or even a decade after the twelfth grade in school before they can properly begin their careers as an unfortunate necessity. It is bad enough that they have to bother with the material directly related to their own field before they can even begin to start in a profession--and the value of the liberal arts an especially tough sell, the more in as their elders have been so relentless about putting them down (with the STEM fetishists second to none here).

2. Students arrive in even selective colleges from relatively strong K-12 educational institutions inadequately prepared for serious liberal arts study (again, in part because their elders thought other things more important).

3. The quality of the liberal arts education imparted to even the able and willing is far from what it ought to be, unhelped by shortchanging of the relevant departments in the allotment of resources, the contradictions between the imperatives of research and of teaching, by the shortcomings of their instructors' training (alas, expected to "retail" what more highly placed personnel produce in C. Wright Mills' discussion of the matter), and it must be admitted, by the morass created by postmodernism-cum-kulturkampf in this section of higher education.

4. The holder of a degree of a non-vocational kind, and especially a few particularly in-demand kinds of vocational degree (nursing, engineering and similarly applicable technical fields, and the more mathematical sorts of business training) have an especially tough time in a job market that, in spite of the media's relentless "You've never had it so good" gaslighting of the public (and the old hypocrisy of employers about wanting to hire "well-rounded individuals"), is frankly lousy for college graduates, with liberal arts majors far from exclusive but still significant sufferers, and looking like it will only get worse. Especially when combined with the realities of what students pay for college, and what the debt burdens mean afterward regardless of the strong likelihood that they will be underemployed, any degree can seem an asset speculation in a market that looks as if it is heading for a crash with no one likely to bail them out.

Few of those who champion liberal arts education are willing to acknowledge any of this, precisely because they have little answer for it.

Instead they fall back on platitudes about education's adding "enrichment to personal lives," only affirming how out of touch they are even when earnestly trying to prove the opposite to the public.

What the Cult of the Good School Tells Us About "Meritocracy"

In what I call the "Cult of the Good School"--the mindless fawning respect for instructional rank within a hierarchy universally known and almost universally unquestioned (Harvard is superior to Yale, any Ivy to anything else in America, private colleges superior to public ones, etc.) one sees not only the "habit of invidious comparison" run amok, but what is in fact social snobbery dressed up as intellectual meritocracy. Yes, the "Big Name" schools may have some of the less privileged among their scholarship students, but anyone who is not a complete idiot knows that the colleges people attend (if they do attend them) have far, far more to do with family background and social class than individual merit, and one might add, even to the quality of the educational opportunities distributed in an exceedingly unequal fashion in American society. The readiness to foot the higher bill for a school far away rather than commute, and for a private school rather than a public one; the advantages possessed by children of alumni and donors and persons in a position to make a "donation" or "do a favor"; the channels that lead from the more elite private schools to the more elite colleges entirely apart from what quality of education they furnish; the existence of a colossal "college placement" industry which sells to eager parents their ability to "work the system"; among much, much else (the ethnic quotas, the athletic scholarships handed out for sports that mainly rich kids play, etc.); should never be slighted. Equally the fact that the "power elite" is disproportionately drawn from such institutions speaks not to the superior merit of the attendees, or the quality of the education imparted as one rather poorly argued "defense of the Ivy League" by two of their more senior functionaries implies, but the social networks and inherited wealth enjoyed by the children of the privileged strata who are their principal students (a fact underlined by how on average the graduate of an elite college may not make much more than the attendee of their local state school), with, indeed, those schools' prestige used to pass off social privilege and social snobbery as intellectual superiority. Still, defenders of the system as it exists, staunch believers in the myth of meritocracy profoundly oblivious to the fact that the term was coined as part of an argument against such thinking, and what his thought-experiment showed about just how remote an actual meritocracy would be from the social order of today, slight them as a matter of course in the sniveling think pieces for which the mainstream media's platforms provide infinite space, as they do for all other forms of Establishment expressions of self-pity.

Of Establishment Self-Pity

We are told that we live in an era of "populism" (ad nauseam). It would be far more accurate to say that we are living in an era in which it has become harder for policymakers and supporters of the status quo generally to ignore public disagreement with the neoliberal and neoconservative policies they have so unflinchingly instituted for a half century in spite of their failures, and contempt of public opinion. In discussing this it is only fair to also note that in the highly uneven political contest which followed the far right, thanks to its advantages (including a good deal of elite sympathy for the far right, and the centrist tendency to accommodate it in a way it would never the left), has been more successful in channeling that disagreement into support for its parties and leaders and their proposed policies than any element on the left--though however ineffectual, it may be that some are looking leftward in a way they did not before (to the horror of center and right alike).

The results have been uncomfortable for many in "the Establishment," certainly those who feel their particular institutions and interests to be challenged by the ascendant political tendency. Per usual, their response has not been an openness to compromise and reform, but disdain for the critics, and (problematic as the term is I think it really is warranted here) pity for themselves.

So does it go with the defenders of the status quo in higher education as they moan "Oh why, why don't the people like us?" then conclude "It's them, not us."

So does it go in Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Philip J. Hanlon's poorly and sloppily researched, reasoned and written counter-attack of critics of that pillar of the Establishment, the Ivy League, in TIME magazine last month--the kind of piece that, as Nathan J. Robinson might put it, forces me to "restrain my instinct to write multi-thousand word rebuttals."

Still, even holding back from the multi-thousand word rebuttal required to dismantle the piece I still find it hard to refrain from comment upon particular bits of it, with one that seems to me to especially do no credit to this "Senior Associate Dean of the Yale School of Management, President of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and Lester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice" and former President of Dartmouth is their claim that universities add "$40 billion annually to the GDP and their technology transfers have contributed over $600 billion to the nation's GOP in the last twenty years."

Let us overlook the fact that in raising this they switch the subject from the Ivy League specifically to higher education generally, confusing the matter. Let us also overlook the reference to "GOP" instead of "GDP" ("GDP" is how it is written in the source they link, leaving no doubt of the nature of the typo, and what passes for copyediting at TIME). Instead let us consider what these two figures, which are supposed to overawe us with the mighty contributions of the university to the economy, mean within the larger picture. As one finds clicking the link about universities adding $40 billion to U.S. GDP (a surprisingly low figure for institutions employing 4 million persons) one finds that the source, a 2019 item posted at the web site of the Association of Governing Boards, identifies the source figure, actually $36.9 billion, as the contribution of international students to the economy specifically, not universities as a whole. It thus does not mean what they say it does.

Meanwhile the reference to the $600 billion (rounded up from the original figure of $591 billion in the same item that supplied the "$40 billion" figure) contributed in technology transfers refers to the years 1996 to 2015--during which Gross Domestic Product came to some $261 trillion in current (before inflation) figures. The result is that all that university research contributed less than 1/4th of 1 percent of U.S. GDP during the whole two decades.

The $600 billion figure is meant to give the impression that the universities are powering an economy roaring with innovation. Alas, when one gets beyond the most superficial sort of examination it affirms just how little innovation was really going on in that period--how little technological change there has been, in spite of the Silicon Valley-singing hype. It is thus also far from satisfying as evidence of what the authors endeavored to prove in that section, namely that what America's higher education delivers is well worth the price--all as these two writers studiously avoid mentioning a good many other statistics, such as the nearly $1.8 trillion student loan debt owned and securitized as of the third quarter of 2024, some $1.6 trillion of this Federal debt owed by some 43 million debtors owing some $35,000 on average. This raises a point the authors overlook--namely the question of, even if we allow for the gains in the economy, who is reaping the benefit--and who bearing the burden, especially at that national level they raise when the matter is convenient, and shun when it is inconvenient, greatly muddling the picture even as they fling the accusation of "cherry picking" at their critics.