Not Deadpool, but Captain America: Brave New World Will be the Real Test of the MCU's Appeal to Movie Audiences

This summer saw the release of the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie since the debacle that was The Marvels back in November 2022, Deadpool vs. Wolverine. It proved a spectacular hit with audiences when it hit theaters, grossing over $600 million in North America and improving on that worldwide--giving it a final take that, even after inflation, was a third higher than that of the original Deadpool way back in 2016.

The courtiers and claqueurs of the press, which had been waiting desperately for something, anything, like Deadpool's success, rushed to seize on it as proof that audiences are as ready to eat up superhero sequels as ever they were in service to the studios' doubling down on announcements of much, much more to come (bringing back Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans and who knows who else to the next edition of The Avengers).

It seemed to me that they were, as usual, getting ahead of themselves. While Deadpool vs. Wolverine has unquestionably lived up to (or exceeded) any reasonable expectation for that film it is still an exceedingly idiosyncratic product. Not only is the Deadpool franchise far from being a conventional superhero series--indeed, it is a beat-you-over-the-head-with-its-postmodernism parody of the superhero film whose popularity can suggest the form's creakiness--but gimmicks like pairing up Deadpool with Wolverine are not to be had every time, while the movie went above and beyond in "giving the people what they want," to the point of its bursting with cameos and in-jokes in ways that also are not easily repeated to the same effect.

That people came out in such great numbers for it does not guarantee that they will come out for more conventional (for many, more stereotyped and blander) fare with anything like the same enthusiasm. The result is that the release of Captain America: Brave New World, due out not quite six weeks from now on Valentine's Day weekend, seems to me a far more meaningful test of the salability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe brand.

That said, how well would Captain America 4 have to do at the box office to "do the job?" Think of the matter this way. Back in 2016 Captain America 3--the first really big release of that summer--pulled in $400 million in North America. Adjusted for inflation this is more like $540 million today.

Deadpool, of course, cleared that mark--by almost $100 million, and this in spite of the handicap of a well-earned R rating. However, no other Marvel Cinematic Universe movie has hit that mark since before the pandemic with the exception of the anomalous Spider-Man: No Way Home (another hard-to-repeat cross-over event), leaving little meaningful precedent, such that I can easily picture the film falling short, perhaps far short, of the half billion dollar mark.

Of course, so high a mark does mean plenty of room for the courtiers and claqueurs to "spin" a lower gross than that as a "win" for Marvel--to, ignoring inflation as they grade on a curve, say that a $300 million gross is great. Alas, the shakiness of Marvel's position after these rough past few years--and the way this movie's production budget exploded (we hear now of an outlay of over $350 million due to reshoots, implying that $300 million won't cut it, especially with ever less to hope for from the Chinese market)--and the fact that there will be two more MCU movies coming out in the next ten months after this (including the Phase Six opener Fantastic Four in July)--mean that Marvel really, really, really needs this one to be a winner which proves "We've still got it!"

The result is that for those interested in the business side of cinema this one is well worth watching--all as the tracking-based estimates should start to make the rounds of the relevant parts of the entertainment media soon.

What Do Ant-Man 3 and the next Fantastic Four Have in Common?

The runners of the Marvel Cinematic Universe took the less than intuitive course of making one of the mega-franchise's weaker links, the Ant-Man series, the launch pad for Phase Five (specifically the third Ant-Man film, Ant-Man: Quantumania).

In hindsight the decision proved to be . . . less than ideal. Many were less than pleased with the third Ant-Man movie, which opened big and then faded fast, ultimately leaving it with an underwhelming gross. Few properly appreciated all the factors that went into this, like the severity of the shortfall of the gross in China (which was decisive for the worldwide take), but even without that fuller view there was no way to present the film as the big success Marvel hoped for, with something of this reflected in the contrast between the $1 billion worldwide gross Screen Rant predicted, and the less than half billion it ended up with. The failure predictably hung heavily over the franchise afterward, which likely did not help the less than triumphant release of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which, again, fell short of expectations on opening weekend and its full run, even if not by so much as to seem an unqualified letdown), or the outright debacle of The Marvels.

Marvel is taking a similar risk in launching Phase Six of the cinematic side of the franchise with the Fantastic Four film coming out next July--Fantastic Four: First Steps.

In contrast with Ant-Man 3 the Fantastic Four film has not been proven a "weaker link," as this will be the MCU's first Fantastic Four film. However, in its premise the Fantastic Four series does entail some of the quirkiness that has probably been a "bit much" for many moviegoers (the stretching abilities of Mr. Fantastic coming off as a bit goofy, for instance, while the depiction of the planet-eating Galactus, who apparently is the villain in this film, entails similar challenges).

The decision to set Fantastic Four on a retro-futuristic Earth also seems risky. The track record of retro-sf at the box office is not great, after all (much as a great many hardcore science fiction fans enjoy them, I suspect they mean a little too much "A-effect" for the general audience), while the implication is of the "multiverse" being important to its premise--not necessarily fatal, but at least implying the possibility of "brain work" for an audience that has sometimes been willing to "go with it" in the past (with Spider-Man, again with Deadpool & Wolverine) but also seems to have regarded the MCU as demanding too much of it for some time now (given its combination of vastness and propensity for self-reference, which is, again, all right for the hardcore fan, not so all right for the more general audience whose liking the movie will be critical to its being a Marvel-caliber success). This is the more the case given that while prior MCU films made use of the multiverse for drawing together familiar, well-received characters, at the core here is a brand new group which have yet to win such acceptance.

And of course, the makers of any new Fantastic Four film also have to contend with the baggage of the less than wholly successful prior attempts to launch a Fantastic Four franchise. (I personally think that the criticism was exaggerated--that the first Fantastic Four especially was entirely satisfactory as the kind of superhero film we still expected back in 2005 however much the "cool" critics sneer at it now, and that the darker 2015 film had a lot of interesting ideas with a lot of potential, some of which Josh Trank did realize in the film we got--but I know that this is not the "conventional wisdom" on either of those movies, and they may well contribute to a sense that any Fantastic Four movie will just not be very good.)

Of course, it may turn out that the "something different" discussed here is exactly what an aging franchise in need of renewal requires--all as the brevity of pop cultural memory that can be so limiting may help here by limiting the significance of any shortfalls of the prior Fantastic Four films for this attempt. Still, it seems to me that there are more than the usual grounds for uncertainty here when we consider its fortunes--even before one considers that the response to Captain America 4 (coming out next Valentine's Day) will matter. The film's winning audiences back to Marvel may boost the brand helpfully, while, alas, the movie's doing poorly may work against it, and in turn have similar implications for a Marvel Phase Six of which we are just beginning to see the faintest outlines.

Celebrity, Fantasy, Identification

In considering the idea of celebrity a while back I mentioned the view some have that the fascination with celebrity is, for some at least, a matter of vicariously living through the rich and famous who at least appear to have everything they do not have--respect, comfort, security, freedom, pleasure and all the rest.

This seems to me to plausibly account for a significant part of the phenomenon--but also that this kind of fantasy is rather a delicate thing, with the arguable decline of celebrity bespeaking people finding it harder than before to do what engaging in such "vicarious living" requires, namely identification with someone they have never met and whose situation is not at all like theirs, precisely because those others have everything they do not.

After all, this is an age in which the distance between the truly privileged and everyone else just keeps growing; and, for all the talk of "social mobility" the way up to that very small space at the top, always so narrow and slippery as to make the struggle to get there an extreme longshot, seems ever more narrow and slippery; while just getting through the day as a "nobody" seems ever tougher, and more painful. Thus is it the case that, between student debt and housing costs and health insurance premiums and the rest the children of people who called themselves "middle class" increasingly realize that anything that can be called middle classness is likely to prove beyond their reach.

All of this makes the feat of imagination required in such identification ever harder--for when even a marginal, pedestrian, middle classness is only a dream, what is the glamour of society's heights?

It doesn't help that the celebrities are endlessly making themselves harder to identify with.

Thus do we see more than the usual attention to something that has never been a secret, namely the way in which Hollywood's upper reaches are the preserve of an "in-marrying caste" of people born into the business (or failing that, from some sort of adjacent privilege that made entrée possible)--and at the same time also see the beneficiaries of such birth, scornful of those who point out such facts, whine in the same unimaginative way as other overprivileged idiots about others not appreciating their "hard work" as if they were merely reaping the conventional rewards of toil (never mind how it compares to that of the people who really make the world go round), and contemptuously fling their advantage in the public's faces (one such actress all but shouting her identification as a beneficiary of nepotism on the red carpet outside one of the awards show which give prizes to people to whom life has already been ridiculously generous).

Thus do we see celebrities who have a reputation for self-absorption, narcissism and snobbery that fans once upon a time took in stride prove more divisive figures--and respond to the criticism by doubling down on their foolishness. ("I am who I am," one Oscar-winning actress said, which meant that the Oscar-winning actress "can't pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year"--and then as a pandemic was shaking the world to its foundations struck an arrogant pose and smirking smile on the cover of a famously snobbish glossy magazine declaring in text positioned alongside her feet that she accepts our apology, as if we are just supposed to know what the hell they are talking about, and indeed ashamed of whatever it was we supposedly did, rather than see this as a stupid provocation at an absolutely inopportune moment that must have made everyone who had cared enough about her doings to "misjudge" her in the way the magazine claimed they did was really right all along.)

And thus is the highlight of an ever-less watched Oscar night a far-past-his-career-peak performer who, after just publishing a memoir in which he purports to share the "wisdom" he gained in his obscenely cushy life (but, to go by the tidbits with which the media afforded yet another crappy celebrity bio the world doesn't need ample free publicity, mostly leave the impression he hasn't grown one iota as a human being since the days when he began a feud with a certain actress playing a certain aunt), slap the host of the ceremony on live TV.

Identify with these people? It's a wonder that any sane person doesn't look away as soon as they appear in front of them--and indeed, far from doing any wonders for the fascination of celebrity they seem excellent additional reason for anyone who cares for their own sanity to keep their distance from a media that trafficks in gossip about their idiocies as much as ever it did, as if compensating for the declining importance of a stratum whose members so often show themselves to be fools and vulgarians by treating them instead in accord with their self-importance, as devoted courtiers ever do their kings.

The Decline of the Sex Symbol

A couple of years ago, perusing a list of the more popular keyword searches, I noticed that those searches for persons, especially those from the world of entertainment, tended to concern people who became famous in the earlier part of the century (or even the last century) rather than more recently--and noticed, too, that they were for the most part women of noted physical attractiveness and appeal.

In that there was a reminder of not just the decline of "household name"-caliber celebrity, but of what may be the even more marked decline of "the sex symbol," an individual with such name recognition who is acknowledged as embodying a particular ideal and fantasy for much of the public.

Considering that it seems relevant that the media universe was more limited, so that household name status was less elusive, but that was not the only thing that was more "limited." The sex symbol belongs to a conceptual world of sex rather than gender, and just two sexes at that, with "heteronormativity" so much taken for granted that the word was scarcely ever spoken, and that particular expectations about how men and women think and feel and act, and of course look, being openly and widely held, such that people could openly and widely hold that particular persons may be regarded as embodying the ideal.

The prevailing view also held that for granted that, just as women's ideals and fantasies are not always pleasing to men, the opposite also holds true (Lee Major's song the "Unknown Stuntman" sums it up, the leading man and not the stuntman getting the girl, while men long for those famed sex symbols Farrah and Bo and Cheryl and Raquel), and that the appropriate response for both men and women is a measure of, if not urbanity, then at least tolerance, regarding the matter.

However one feels about this "traditionalist" view of these matters and their pop cultural implications, there is no question that it is more challenged than ever, and that the challenge has complicated what a sex symbol needs beyond name recognition such that they could not be a "symbol" without it--that broad acknowledgment of their having exactly this kind of appeal, precisely because even those who may not feel very good about, for example, conventional standards of beauty, are at least ready to admit that, yes, they indeed exist, and yes, a particular actress is by that standard extraordinary, because those who admire the beauty in question feel free to express it publicly.

Anything like that is less likely to be seen in the relevant parts of the media these days, especially insofar as tolerance and urbanity are cast to the wind as it tends toward a more open sex-negativity and hostility to the "male gaze," and challenges to the existence of "gender norms" as such, and insistence upon "inclusiveness" and "body positivity" in media imagery, and anyone desirous of mainstream media respectability required to adhere to the associated rules. Indeed, looking at the media's products these days--film, TV, advertising across the media spectrum--it can often seem as if the acknowledgment of any conventional ideals or fantasies is purely negative in nature, evident in decisions regarding script or casting refusing them, as if saying "We know exactly what you expect to see here, what you want to see here, and we're making a point of giving you the diametrical opposite! In your face! Ha!"--and this so relentlessly that Sydney Sweeney's merely showing a bit of cleavage on Saturday Night Live sufficed to whip up a storm of intensely politicized online chatter in a way that makes a contrast with the reaction to that undisputed sex symbol of the day (to go by the prominence of her name in the search result list, our day too) Pamela Anderson getting naked during the monologue she gave when she was the guest host in 1997.

Such rancor only underlines the fact of the old-fashioned sex symbol as having been a casualty of the culture war-ization of everything.

In turn, I suspect, the decline of the sex symbol has probably taken its toll on the institution of celebrity as such--ideals and fantasy, after all, being what a significant part of celebrity has always been about.

Can the Democratic Party Really Move Left?

Another presidential election, another appallingly blundered campaign, another debacle for the Democratic Party--and now calls for the party to reform itself, to be more mindful of the working class, to in a word move leftwards in its stance.

Can the Democratic Party reform do so? Certainly the historical record is unpromising that way--the party leadership having consistently treated the calls to move left that are not at all novel now but a constant since the '80s with complete contempt, as they blamed the many defeats they suffered in taking this course on anything and everything else for the outcome, including not just the Electoral College system, the luring away of Democratic Party voters by the siren songs of candidates outside the two-party system, the politics of gender and race, "foreign interference," etc., but their party supposedly having gone too far left in its appeals as it was, suggesting that they should in fact tack right as they promise that "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia" et. al.. Moreover, it is abundantly clear that their reaction to 2024 has been identical to their behavior of the past four decades.

Given such a record any intelligent observer must wonder as to why the party's leaders have been so resistant for so long to any such tacking, and if they are serious about an answer easily get one because so many, many, persons, a number of whom even had decent access to the mainstream, have explained the matter over and over again in terms that the most simple-minded should be able to understand if they are at all sincere about doing so. Consider, for example, Gore Vidal's quip about the two-party system in the U.S.: that "[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party" with the Democratic Party one of its "two right wings," with the difference between them that the Republicans were "more rigid and doctrinaire" in regard to "laissez-faire" economic pieties and historically less "willing . . . to make [the] small adjustments" required "when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand."

If one takes this view of the Democratic Party then one cannot hope for very much from it in this way--the more in as Vidal's much-quoted remark, which appeared in an article he published in Esquire in 1975, describes the Democratic Party in a time in which even a relatively conservative Democratic candidate for the Presidency could promise universal health care and a jobs guarantee and still land his party's nomination, then in office embark on an ambitious government program of intervention in the energy sector, including state-owned enterprise. One can rather less credit the Democratic Party with being "less rigid and doctrinaire" about "laissez-faire" or more "willing . . . to make small adjustments" to accommodate the marginalized or dissenting today than it was then, but rather the opposite in an age in which they have embraced neoliberalism and neoconservatism in economic, social, foreign policy (which leaves only a Bernie Sanders-type talking of such things as universal health care and jobs guarantees, and as a result the party leaders determined to do whatever it takes to stop his getting anywhere near the nomination).

Indeed, taking up the view of the Democratic Party as "one of the right wings of the Property Party" with an eye to its place on the political spectrum then one is apt to find it situated not in the portion identified with "liberalism", and certainly not on "the left," but rather in the position we identify with the "center," with centrism understood as a deep conservatism distinguished from that of "the other right wing" by that greater willingness to make small adjustments lest assorted "malcontent" elements "get out of hand", and a greater concern with blocking the left than anything else (with what would not so long ago have been thought center-left included here). That is to say that if winning elections requires the Democratic Party to move left its centrist commitment means that it would rather lose elections than do so--at least, so long as it makes sure that the left does not win them--and indeed see it as its ideological mission to suffer the defeat if that is the price of keeping the left and indeed even those who might actually rate the label "liberal" marginalized. All this implies that the defeat of 2024, just like all the past defeats by the Republicans cannot be expected to budge it leftward from its Clinton-Obama-Biden-era position toward even the "small adjustment"-minded centrism of the mid-century period (never mind the fuller realization of the social democratic policies that many Democratic voters would like to see, like actual universal health care instead of just promises of such care). But of course anyone remotely approaching the standing of an official spokesperson for the party is not going to spell it out for the public, while the media's own political orientation, and what may be least offensively described as its courtier-like attitude toward people "in high places," are such that it does not even try to explain the truth behind the bland palaver they so delight in retailing to the people they demand turn off their ad blockers and buy subscriptions for what they have the gall to call "good journalism."

The Rise and Decline of the Supermodel

The claim that the institution of the movie star has faded away has now been heard for rather a long time (at least, insofar as we mean an actor who is not simply well-known or well-liked or well-respected but a Personage so popular that their being the lead of a movie will serve to bring an appreciable number of people to the theater when it makes its debut). However, the claim does not go wholly unchallenged. Thus do we time and again hear that some newcomer nobody ever heard of, because (when one looks them up they see that) they haven't actually been in many movies let alone headlined a hit movie, has somehow "proven" that stardom still exists. Those who claim this may simply be engaged in so much claquing, but that they take this particular line in their claquing still says something of the readiness to believe that actors still do become movie stars.

By contrast I have not noticed anyone denying that the heyday of the supermodel is past--that we are a long way from that moment when the top models enjoyed the broad stardom of Christie and Cheryl, of Cindy and Claudia and Christy with a "ty" (especially if you are of a certain generation you likely knew instantly who I was talking about just from the mention of the first name), when it could seem as if the faces of those at the top of the modeling profession were "everywhere," when the Buti brothers founded the Fashion Cafe, and JFK Jr.'s political magazine George featured supermodels like Claudia and Christy in memorable tableaus on its covers. Indeed, a fairly commonplace narrative holds that with Hollywood becoming less glamorous than before in the "New Hollywood" era, fashion filled the gap--and held its place in pop culture until the supermodels seemed to be getting too pleased with themselves (a moment purveyors of the narrative identify with Linda Evangelista's offhand remark that "I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day"), after which backlash set in, and pop culture was never the same again (with recent revisitation of the remarks by the press, of course, giving the hacks of the press an excuse to go over it all again).

I can't say that I ever found that explanation satisfying. (For me these "One line blew it all" explanations never are.) Rather more was going on. Some of it seems fairly obvious--like that fragmentation of media culture that lets media hacks get away with pretending that somebody who has barely appeared in any movies is a movie star because no one person has any sort of handle on all that's going on anymore, which reflects how much less likely one is to feel that a particular face is "everywhere." There is also the reality that the celebration of physical beauty inextricable from the status of the supermodel has sat uneasily with those insistent on "inclusion," "body positivity" and the merciless thwarting and disciplining of the "male gaze" in media imagery getting so much influence in this cultural arena. (Indeed, if you had ever wondered what commercials for Revlon and Victoria's Secret would look like if the columnists at the Guardian had a say in their making, well, these past few years you didn't need to wonder any more.)

Still, it seems to me that rather more significant than the cultural warfare were the larger and more consequential developments in the world that exacerbated that warfare--not least globalization's wreck after the great financial crisis of 2007-2008, which seems to me the most important thing of all. The supermodel's natural habitat was a world of exuberant fantasy of luxurious, jet-setting glamour befitting an age of globalizing boom, or at least its appearance, which lost whatever credibility it may ever have had in these years. After all, the super-rich may be super-richer than ever before, but, despite the talking heads' fixation on this as if it were the measure of everything, the broad public is ever more alert to the fact that they are not super-rich, that indeed in many ways they are less rich than they were just a short while ago--all as the centibillionaires themselves seem uneasy, thinking less than before of the jet-setting good life and more the hope that, as Douglas Rushkoff had it, "as long [as] they have enough money and the right technology, they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making" in the way the plebs cannot.

What Does the Decline of the Supermodel Have to do with Globalization?

In considering the decline of celebrity I have had something to say of the decline of the movie star, and the decline of the sports star.

However, one can also speak of the decline of the supermodel. One can see that decline as due to some of the same factors as the decline of celebrity generally--the broadly more fragmented and conflicted popular culture, for example. Still, just like the decline of the movie star and the sports star the decline of the supermodel has had its own, more distinct, features.

After all, consider those things with which we tend to associate supermodels. We think of prestigious brands of clothing and cosmetics, in lushly produced ads playing on your screen. We think of world capitals like New York, and Paris, and Milan, and the tropical getaways of the rich and famous that are the backdrops to so many swimsuit shoots, and other much-romanticized world capital/getaway locations like these, and jet-setting among them all.

Consider also the era in which the fascination with the supermodel emerged and really flourished--the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and after its arguable peak in the last decade of the century, the 2000s.

These decades together comprise the era of what it became fashionable to call "globalization" and what the more politically and economically literate recognize as "neoliberalism," with the peak of the supermodel phenomenon also the period in which globalization's champions' promises of opulence were most extravagant and widely heeded, not least in a "New Economy," dot-com bubble-era America singing global anthems to multinational corporations. These same decades also saw the digitalization of media we now take so much for granted, which saw the screens through which we took in the world beyond our immediate surroundings ever bigger and more ubiquitous, with, again, those same years in which the supermodel and globalization were at their peaks a watershed here with the Internet exploding into wide use at the very same time, all as an edgier, "extreme," aesthetic which had as one of its aspects a less restrained and sexier pop culture emerged, with advertising one level at which this was especially evident.

Within this context what the supermodel represented and what she helped sell was the fantasy of a free, cosmopolitan, gracious, graceful, aesthetic, sensual, luxurious life in the unprecedentedly exuberant, borderless world that unleashed markets and surging "innovation" were supposed to be making, coming at you through those screens bringing you the world as never before.

Indeed, looking back the then-novel and much-commented upon web-streaming of the 1999 Victoria's Secret fashion show, the images of the show playing on that giant TV screen over that crossroads of the world in global fashion capital New York's Times Square, seem a perfect symbol of the moment.

Of course, however crisply rendered through those larger and higher-definition displays, the fantasy was always just that, a fantasy, and indeed a fantasy built on top of another fantasy--the fantasy of neoliberalism, in spite of all logic and the lessons to be drawn from all of economic history, actually working as promised by its claqueurs. However, that more foundational fantasy has withered in the years since the Great Recession. And I suspect that in the wake of that event whether people think so consciously or not the glamorous fantasy described here has just moved too far out of reach for a critical mass of them in an age that feels ever more limited and stifling as they struggle ever harder to make it through the day, and that the painful reality of being at the bottom of the heap or close to it counts for more with them than the practical impossibility of their ever experiencing life "at the top" as what they see through their ever-higher quality and more inescapable screens increasingly leaves them overwhelmed rather than exhilarated in a profoundly un-sexy time. Indeed, amid the "We're all in this together" claptrap that filled the media as the COVID-19 pandemic struck a world that was already coming apart, and began killing tens of millions of people, damaging the bodies and minds of hundreds of millions more and traumatizing and otherwise upending the lives of many more still as it cut a swath among the least fortunate and able to protect themselves, even the courtiers of the elite were prepared to acknowledge the measure of alienation among the many. If they did so in only a limited way, for a brief moment, what now in media years seems a whole lifetime ago, still they did it, providing a rare public recognition of the reality well worth remembering for how it has endured beyond that short-lived readiness to even make the admission that such a thing as the pandemic exists at all.

What Do the Hits and Flops of 2024 Say About the Box Office Today? And in 2025?

At the end of 2023, the first year with a slate of "big" releases thought really comparable to what we took for granted pre-COVID-19, it seemed that there were clear conclusions to be drawn about the North American box office. In particular it seemed that moviegoing had contracted structurally (per capita ticket sales in North America fallen from 3+ to 2 a year), and the big-budget franchise movies of the kind Hollywood favors have become less reliable earners, amid a business changing so that the pursuit of profitability favors lower-budgeted movies pitched at an enthusiastic built-in audience (Five Nights at Freddy's, The Eras Tour), and more novel fare generally (Barbie, Oppenheimer, in its way the animated Spider-Man movie).

By contrast as 2024 draws to a close the picture looks to me more ambiguous. Yes, as I said, Hollywood was eager to refute any such reading of the trend, and clung so hard to the thought that Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine would validate that hope, and then when they had their success took it as a green light to greenlight more, More, MORE! of the same old, same old (in the wake of Inside Out 2's success announcing new Shrek and Ice Age animated films, and as filmgoers flocked to Deadpool's latest, a relaunch of the Avengers).

Still, one may wonder at the meaning of the success of even those two particularly big successes, given the weakness of the recent competition, especially in this summer season--and in the case of Deadpool, the extreme idiosyncrasy of the offering. (The movie is, on certain admittedly not very ambitious terms, a subversion of the superhero film rather than a conventional movie of the type, which was so overflowing with crowd-pleasing gimmickry that in this case fans were more friendly than critics to its beating of audiences over the head with its postmodernism.)

So does it go with other movies, with, for example, Beetlejuice 2 and Wicked each as easily testifying to public responsiveness to something a little different from what they commonly get these days (a now rare high concept comedy with a quirky supernatural theme, a similarly rare big splashy musical) as they do "more franchise movies" of the conventional kinds. All of this seems to me the more the case given that, even with the slate thinner than in most years, the more mediocre performers afford some confirmation of the tendency. Thus did Deadpool win big--but response to the year's other superhero movies proved faint (with Madame Web flopping hard and Venom 3 disappointing). Meanwhile the new editions of Twister, Bad Boys, Planet of the Apes, Alien, Ghostbusters, etc. succeeded only by a more modest measure, far from proving that there is the kind of vast appetite for big franchise films that still seemed present in the years before the pandemic (all as Mad Max provided the summer a really big-budgeted flop, and Gladiator may do the same for fall). At the same time, providing positive affirmation of last year's lessons about pursuing narrow but deep appeal on a budget, It Ends with Us will probably come in way ahead of many of its more stereotyped and bigger-budgeted rivals when the folks at Deadline consider the "most valuable blockbusters" next spring.

This seems to me something to keep in mind as we look ahead to next year, which looks to be packed with the conventional kinds of would-be blockbusters in the same way that 2023 was, and most pre-pandemic years were as well. Just to name the most obvious contenders we have four really first-rank superhero movies, including three Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films (Captain America 4, the new Fantastic Four, and reclaiming the first weekend in May for the MCU, The Thunderbolts), and James Gunn's Superman movie--as compared with the one such superhero movie we got this year. There will be more animation (Zootopia 2 from Disney, Elio from Disney's subsidiary Pixar) and live-action adaptations of animated classics (Disney releasing such versions of both Snow White and Lilo & Stitch, and Universal presenting a live-action version of its more recent success How to Train Your Dragon). There will be more of James Cameron's Avatar saga (Fire and Ash), more Jurassic World (Rebirth), and more spy-fi from the Mission: Impossible franchise (the second half of 2023's Dead Reckoning), while I think the second half of Wicked stands comparison with this crowd to go by how the first half has done with theatergoers.

My guess is that in spite of all that we will see the same level of moviegoing we have in the 2022-2024 period, and the big movies of this more crowded roster splitting up that shrunken take. Where more specific outcomes are concerned, I do have a few to offer:

* I have a hard time picturing all three Marvel Cinematic Universe films being the kind of solid hits we saw in Phase Three that is the only thing that will banish the less happy memories of the franchise's last five years (indeed, I expect leeriness of the revamped Captain America, hesitations about the obscure Thunderbolts, skepticism about a third try with the Fantastic Four). The result is that talk of "Marvel fatigue," and "superhero fatigue" will continue (especially if Superman also does poorly, a not unlikely prospect given DCEU's track record and the incompatibility between Gunn's sensibility with the Superman mythos).

* I expect that Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning will not improve on the performance of its predecessor, which was the lowest-grossing installment in the series to date. Indeed, the combination of the annoying decision to split one movie into two (Hollywood has to know people hate this, but must suppose it sells the second ticket often enough to more than make up for it), combined with the bumping of the initial release date to make for a two year gap between installments of the declining franchise, can easily see it do worse, making it the new lowest-grossing installment to date. The result is that, even if we don't talk about the very evident "spy-fi fatigue" Hollywood faces along with the superhero fatigue (in the declining grosses for James Bond, Fast and Furious, etc.), we will have more proof that spies, like superheroes, just aren't what they used to be here.

* Jurassic World: Rebirth, the second reboot of (and fourth installment in) the Jurassic Park franchise in less than a decade, may easily find audiences sated--the more in as a downward trend has been evident in the grosses of the prior films. (Adjusted for inflation Dominion's $376 million in North America in 2022 was less than half Jurassic World's $652 million in 2016.) The result is that I can see a lot of folks giving this one a pass as well, at least enough to confirm the decline in enthusiasm.

I will also add that I have little expectation that these three franchises, for which the international market has been so important, and for which China had been so important in the heyday of Hollywood in that market, will find no relief there. And the likelihood of undeniable underperformance, or outright flop, in some of these cases and in others (again, it is a pre-pandemic slate being released into a post-pandemic market, that larger number of would-be blockbusters chasing the same number of ticket-buyers) will make 2025 look more like 2023 than it will 2024--at least, to those willing to admit the fact, who may not be many. Indeed, even if 2025 proves to be as packed with box office disasters as the catastrophic year of 2023 I suspect that Hollywood's response will be to dismiss any trend ("I don't wanna hear about no superhero fatigue!") as its officers and their courtiers in the media speak only of errors in the making of individual films they will attribute to the Artists and not the Suits (as their verbiage evokes that stupid and supercilious phrase, "the adults in the room"), and look forward to the same strategy delivering better results in 2026, because they haven't heard about that definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. While in the wake of the shocks, reversals, disasters of the past decade making any guess about 2026 seems rather a bold thing, I suspect that it too will not go the way they hope it will--but that their memories will not extend back this far, and they will hope the same goes for everyone else.

Is Venom 3 a Flop?

How has Venom 3 (Venom: Last Dance) done at the box office?

Let us consider a suitable benchmark first, namely how the two preceding Venom films did. The first two movies' grosses broke the $200 million in North America--at a time of lower ticket prices, and, in the case of the sequel, when the pandemic still had moviegoing severely depressed. Put into today's terms the first Venom made $267 million in North America in 2018, the second $244 million in the strained conditions of 2021.

By contrast Venom 3 has made $139 million as of its seventh weekend, with almost no way to go past that --about half what its predecessors made when we count in inflation, and indeed just a little more than Boxoffice Pro estimated the movie might make in just its opening weekend a month before release (when the range of its forecast was $80-$120 million).

There is no way to call that a ringing success.

In fairness, the film held up a bit better internationally from the second film to the third, at least, the international gross for Venom 3 roughly matching that for Venom 2, after inflation (with some $334 million collected)--though that was admittedly a significant comedown from what the first film did ($643 million internationally in 2018, equal to over $800 million today, a fact which netted the backers a robust quarter of a billion dollar profit according to Deadline's calculations).

The result is that one could say that a franchise that opened with a bang, and which some thought would have done better on its second go in happier circumstances, with all that seemed to promise for the third and closing installment, is going out with a whimper. Still, my guess is that given the movie's low production cost (just $110-$120 million according to the estimates I have seen reported) the near half-billion theatrical gross with which it is finishing up may get it past break-even, with the post-theatrical income enabling it to do better still--such that if a disappointment the backers at least end up "in the black" on this one, which is more than can be said for a good many recent comic book-based movies.

Is Twisters a Flop?

Last summer I had something to say of Twisters' prospects and early performance.

As we are now in December we can safely discuss how it all went in the end.

As it happened the movie made some $371 million globally in its theatrical run.

It is not a spectacular figure by the standard of big summer movies--or for that matter, any movie that costs $150-$200 million for the production, before marketing costs come in.

. It is also not a spectacular figure relative to the original 1996 Twister--which made a little under a half billion globally three inflationary decades ago, and which if we adjusted its gross for inflation would be a billion dollar hit in today's terms (which is to say that it made almost three times what Twisters did).

Yet the entertainment press treated Twisters not as a colossal letdown (the way they rushed to do with the comparable Independence Day 2, another sequel to a hit from 1996 that actually made more money than Twisters did eight years later), but rather talked up what a big hit it supposedly was.

There are three reasons for that.

1. Twisters, if not a runaway success like the original, did relatively well in North America, where it took in some $268 million--72 percent of the total. Had, as is more typical with big summer blockbusters the domestic/foreign split been the other way around, with the movie making 72 percent of its money outside North America on top of that $268 million take we would have every reason to call it a good-sized hit in light of the near-billion dollar take. Indeed, had it merely matched its domestic gross internationally the way the original Twister did (and so finished north of $500 million+) the producers would have reason to feel it hadn't been a bad idea. But it didn't--and if this depressed the global take the fact got less attention than it might have given that most writing about these matters focuses on the home market.

2. In spite of the fact that the biggest movies make as much now as they could have been expected to before the pandemic (Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun 2, Avatar 2, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Inside Out 2, etc.), in line with its members' duties as courtiers and claqueurs and the fact of smaller theatrical revenues on the whole, the entertainment press has (even while resisting drawing any broader conclusions from the situation) lowered its bar for judging movie performance generally, such that a gross of $268 million domestically now is talked up in a way that $268 million wouldn't have been five years ago, especially where there is room to take a "glass half full" view of the situation. (The fact that the original Twister came out so long ago and really big hits so few these years and that international failure is relatively easy to slight all made it easier in this case.)

3. Early on the media started pushing the narrative that Twisters was a case of Hollywood playing to the Red states it supposedly shunned most of the time, and profiting by it--an ideologically freighted narrative that those taking this line would not have marred by facts and numbers and such, such as we have seen in the past. (The reader may recall how back in 2015 the media pushed the idea that Mad Max: Fury Road was a feminist movie that had become a commercial triumph, when the movie was not really that big a ticket-seller by summer action movie standards, and indeed a money-loser--with, perhaps, the fact that this political narrative is turned about in this case telling of a broad rightward shift on the part of the "centrist" media in this way as in others.)

Still, even if the movie is absolutely not an unqualified hit, and indeed almost inarguably a commercial failure by several standards (comparison with the original's box office performance, expectations for $200 million summer spectacles generally, and the weakness of the international box office by just about any measure), it is not wholly out of the question that when everything is reckoned up we will see that home entertainment and the rest of the post-theatrical income stream carried the movie to and even beyond the break-even point given the way these things tend to go. (Of the rough $370 million gross the studio probably got somewhere around $180 million. Add in another 80 percent from those other revenue streams such as has been common in recent years, and you end up with $330 million+, which I think would probably do the job according to the usual, admittedly imperfect, accounting.)

Still, that the movie did not do better in a summer of what was on the whole limited competition, is a reminder of the fact that there was no real demand out there for a new edition of the old hit, and that Hollywood is really milking any old success of this kind it can find as it refuses to reckon with what seems a more limited appetite than before for this kind of spectacle.

It also seems to me telling of what I had to say about the hits of last year--that Hollywood's best road to profitability may be, instead of putting up tentpoles and hoping "everyone" comes, producing movies with a deep appeal to more limited audiences, while keeping the budget in check. I doubt there was any such strategy at work with Twisters (rather than a movie that would play well in the Red states its backers hoped for a movie that would play well everywhere when they put up that $200 million+, and just failed to achieve that), but another film that followed just three weeks later followed it perfectly. It Ends with Us grossed almost as much at the box office as Twisters ($351 million to Twisters' $371 million)--on a budget of a mere $25 million. The result makes It Ends with Us likely to be one of the most profitable movies of 2024, perhaps the most profitable in relative terms and in terms of absolute profit plausibly one of the top ten on Deadline's list next year--a distinction Twisters seems very unlikely to enjoy.

James Gunn, Edgelord

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to hear that I am no fan of '90s independent film, with its many unattractive traits including its smug, lazy, show-offy--dare I say it, EXTREME!--edginess (exemplified by that "filmmaker" whose critical adulation has lasted long enough for him to become the "Grand Old Man" of the movement, Quentin Tarantino).

Director and now DC Films boss James Gunn may be said to have come out of not only that period, but that ferment, with his work marked by it from Tromeo and Juliet forward. Thus writing the story and screenplay for 2002's live-action Scooby-Doo film he initially produced an R-rated script, which, in spite of the cuts and other changes, in its final PG-rated form still not only made Scrappy-Doo the villain (again, not just edgy, but lazy), but gave him an R-rated vocabulary (even if his usage of it is strategically cut off in the film we get) and had him literally piss all over Daphne while they are riding the Mystery Machine in a flashback scene (which, given that she was being played by Sarah Michelle Gellar in her Buffy the Vampire Slayer era, also meant his appearing to piss all over a feminist icon in her heyday).

All of this carried over to his superhero films, which actually began with the low-budget Super (which Gunn didn't have to keep PG, and didn't), but also the PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy films, where he wore a cheap nihilism on his sleeve throughout, from running his gag in which characters get cut off in the middle of a dramatic monologue into the ground, to having Yondu massacre his mutinous crewmen to the sounds of "Come a Little Bit Closer," before getting himself fired from the job of directing the third and last installment for some, again, edgelord, jokes on Twitter that came back to haunt him (before he was rehired and did his thing all over again).

If I generally find Gunn's sensibility wearisome, especially as this side of '90s culture grows ever more stale and trite, it at least seemed passable with the Guardians franchise (at least, to this viewer who never read any of the relevant comics)--but less so with the DC Extended Universe, and still more its most celebrated characters, such that barring his managing to show another side to himself as an artiste (something his cohort is not known for), it seems to me to bode poorly for their latest crack at satisfying their Marvel envy. Or, rather, their envy of what Marvel used to be in the Beforetime preceding the pandemic.

The Box Office Performance of Alien: Romulus

NOTE: This post is a derivative of a reply to a reader's comment back in October. The original post, and exchange, may be found here.

I previously declined to venture a comment about Alien: Romulus because when thinking about a film's likely or actual performance I tend to look for close points of comparison and extrapolate from that. This was until recently fairly easy with the Marvel movies, for example, because there were so many of them released so close together that it was possible to find very close precedents and search for trends among them. It was a lot harder with the Alien movies because they have been very widely separated over time, with a certain amount of variety among them, while I wasn't sure what kind of Alien movie Romulus would be (whether it would be more action- or horror-oriented, whether it would be more or less attentive to the "mythology" of the series). It seemed to me possible that the movie could add to the long list of underperforming franchise films of the last couple of years, but also possible it would do better, and in the end it has been a modest success. Even when we adjust for inflation Alien: Romulus seems to have done a little better domestically and internationally than 2017's Covenant (picking up $350 million worldwide, versus the $310 million or so Covenant made in today's dollars). That still leaves it a pretty long way away from the heights reached by the first two movies (the original Alien was almost an $800 million hit in today's terms), and the top rank of blockbusters today (the $1 billion+ grossers), but given that it more than quadrupled the reported production budget ($80 million) it is almost certainly turning a decent profit by today's standards ($100 million+ not out of the question when we take into account the post-theatrical income streams).

Especially given how Hollywood remains committed to the "franchise film," and how so many of the latest franchise films are doing a lot less well than Alien has just done, it is unsurprising that Fox has already decided to continue the franchise. So far as I know development of that next film is still in its early stages, but I would not be surprised if the backers decided to get a little more ambitious, aiming for something more than a relatively low-budgeted August release the next time around--maybe profitably, maybe not.

"It's Not the Economy, Stupid," They Still Tell Us

The media continues to insist that "It Wasn't the Economy, Stupid" to those trying to understand the meaning of the U.S. presidential election of 2024. Exemplary of this is Sarah Bernstein's piece in the New York Times attributing the outcome of the election to America's "dating culture." Again seizing on the "male rage" theme ever popular with the culture war addicts, Ms. Bernstein argues for the ultimate source of said rage being the expectation that males be the bread-winners in their households--that if it is now the norm for married women to work, the men bring home a significantly larger paycheck--has led to frustration among both men and women, especially in an era in which the "gender gap" in pay has narrowed, and a rising proportion of women enjoy superior educational and occupational outcomes to a rising proportion of the male population. (Men who cannot meet the resulting higher income standard find a growing proportion of women ruling them out as prospects.)

I will not go so far as to argue that there is nothing to this. It does seem to me that men and women do widely hold the expectation Ms. Bernstein talks about, and all the statistics I have seen testify to the substance of the shift in relative incomes that she describes. However, as an explanation of the election, or even the dating woes of the population, it is sadly lacking. After all, while the income gap between men and women has narrowed, this has largely been a matter of stagnation or erosion of incomes for the vast majority of males when income is taken in inflation-adjusted terms rather than of women's incomes catching up to those of prosperous male counterparts. (Indeed, median female income actually held steady as a proportion of per capita GDP from the 1950s to today.) As the situation also implies given that relative to many of the essentials of daily living (housing, auto ownership, higher education, health insurance premiums, etc.) the purchasing power of those male incomes has collapsed, with every sign indicating that collapse's continuing with no end in sight , all as economic insecurity generally is increasing.

The result is that even if women have caught men up this way what they have actually caught up to, contrary to the impression Ms. Bernstein gives of women doing so well that they can easily support not just themselves but a "househusband," means that few women interested in the financing of a household, a marriage, the rearing of children can really afford to give no thought to a partner contributing a second income, and indeed a fairly significant one. Accordingly the fact that women, even relatively high-income women, expect that a prospective partner make at least as much as they do, reflects hard economic reality--reality which would endure regardless of notions about gender. However, that observation would be unlikely to appear in an essay in the Times, or any other publication of its ilk, which much prefer to focus on the differences across the gender line than the differences which cut across it, while gaslighting the public with insistences that "You've never had it so good" as they struggle harder and harder to make ends meet in ways that those who write for the opinion pages of publications like these have rarely ever had to do.

It's Still the Economy, Stupid--But They're Trying Very Hard to Make You Forget It

After months of hearing that "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" from the media outlets covering the 2024 presidential election, which were eager for the election to be about anything else, it turned out to be about . . . the economy, stupid. Afterward the media outlets admitted as much, however reluctantly--saying stupid things like "It Wasn't the Economy, it Was Inflation" (as if inflation were somehow a thing apart from the economy)--and then hastened to bury the realization as they went on selling the "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" narrative again in spite of the hard facts.

Consider the particularly popular "White male rage" variation on the argument--and how it compares with the data on how Americans actually voted. According to the data set published by U.S. News & World Report, 54 percent of the White women who voted, 44 percent of Hispanics (including 40 percent of Hispanic women), and 17 percent of African-Americans (including 11 percent of African-American women), voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump. Given those numbers it is safe to say that the majority of the votes for Trump came from persons classifiable as outside the "White male" category--all as, not incidentally, a far from negligible 39 percent of White males voted for Harris (a vote on the part of that group just 7 percent lower than the vote for Harris among White women). That does not rule out the "status politics" of the country, which the media do everything in their power to whip up at every turn in the shabbiest and most cynical way, has factored into the electoral outcome. However, the reduction of Trump's victory to "White male rage" simply does not find validation in the numbers, or anything else--though of course, those who wanted to pretend "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" have never let hard fact get in the way of their loathsome culture war-mongering.

The Last Great Moral Panic Over Violence on Network TV

As I have remarked again and again over the years, part of what gave the 1990s its distinctive flavor as a period was the sense of the country being aware of its having a nervous breakdown as it had that breakdown, one expression of which was the irony that seemed for many the only possible attitude toward many of the increasingly insane-seeming events of the day.

I place in the category of such events Law & Order actor Michael Moriarty's showdown with Attorney General Janet Reno over her threats to censor network TV if it did not significantly reduce the amount of violence that it put on the air.

Looking back it seems to me to be plausible, even probable, that Reno's kicking up a furor over TV violence was a cynical ploy by a Clinton administration implementing a thoroughly neoliberal economic program ("Reinventing Government," NAFTA, etc. as the modest social promises were kicked to the curb) that, generally unpopular with a public that had overwhelmingly voted against this path, outraged supporters who rightly felt betrayed, while winning no points from the right for its vigorous furtherance of the Reagan Revolution--and attempting to change the subject and score cheap points with an appeal to the Helen Lovejoys of the world at a time when this was still a fairly hot topic with them.

Hence the grandstanding about what was airing on TV as entertainment--and the specific decision to focus on violence on TV rather than sex on TV, sex usually the more controversial thing, and therefore more charged, not least because it was so much a concern of the culture warriors. By contrast concern for the violence on TV was a less charged matter, in part because of how concern about it could seem to cut across ideological lines, and be less suggestive of pandering to a right-wing Agenda in this way as in so many others.

Hence also the ease with which Reno backed away from her calls with nothing done about the matter--that people were less eager for something to be done about the violence on TV than the sex on TV making her and the administration less likely to catch criticism for the retreat (especially from that right that they were so anxious not to offend any more than they were already doing, little good that it ever did them).

Indeed, the only real consequence of the affair can seem to be the damage Mr. Moriarty did to his career by taking the cynically proffered bait. Thus did the fuss, which was undesired by Moriarty's producers and certainly to hear him tell it, see him stand alone, like Gary Cooper in High Noon (!)--but afterward parting ways with the show, and if he went on working afterward, never landing a really comparable gig again, no starring role in a comparably high-profile series appearing in his list of credits three decades on.

Of course, that did not mean that disputation over the perceived violence of the content on network television was wholly at an end. Still, in line with the broad politics that made Janet Reno's maneuver such a a safe one for her to undertake, and the fact that the successor administration was a Republican one with a blatant culture war commitment, sex figured in it much more highly than violence, such that when George W. Bush appointee to the Federal Communications Commission Michael Powell--like the Clinton administration, easy to see as cynically stoking the culture war as cover and a source of cheap political points as it busily furthered the implementation of the neoliberal agenda--aggressively handing out fines during his tenure, hitting NYPD Blue with a million dollar penalty for nudity, not violence, while giving the "patriotic gore" in an uncensored broadcast of Saving Private Ryan a pass. It was also sex that was on the minds of those who denounced Desperate Housewives in its early days, and the display of Janet Jackson's nipple at the Super Bowl, with the same carrying over to the censoriousness of One Million Moms and #MeToo alike. However, that was far from all of it. The reality was that Big Media was changing, with before the end of the 1990s HBO dramas like The Sopranos making NYPD Blue look tame by comparison--all as the Internet exploded the scene. Simply put, the culture moved on--and so did the struggles over the censorship of that culture, which rage on to the same noxious ends as ever they did.