I recently had something to say of the non-appearance of Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament and its revelation of Hollywood's biggest moneymakers and money-losers of 2025, and specifically my guesses as to why it hasn't happened. (Short version: very possibly squeamishness about another lousy year for a Hollywood that may not be able to take much more, and the inhibitions created by all the merger-and-acquisition intrigue.) But I imagine most of those who have found their way to this blog because of their interest in the box office would be more interested in knowing what the list would be likely to contain rather than why it hasn't appeared. Again, I don't pretend to have inside info, but I have been looking at these numbers for a while, and I'm not entirely uncomfortable hazarding some estimates--to which estimates I devote this post.
Insofar as last year's list is concerned it seems to me that you can expect that if there were a tournament this year Zootopia 2 would be the Most Valuable Blockbuster by a long way given its combination of the year's highest gross (nearly $1.9 billion!) with its budget ($150 million, less than 1/12th as much). Beyond that it gets trickier but the live-action Lilo & Stitch, A Minecraft Movie, Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Jurassic World: Rebirth would most likely round out the top five. Given the extremely high outlay on Avatar (leaving it with a break-even point possibly as high as $1.3 billion, not much below the $1.5 billion it did make), the numbers I have seen have Lilo & Stitch (a $100 million budget and a gross a bit over $1 billion) the best bet for number two, with a Minecraft movie that cost somewhat more and made just a little less ($150 million) a safe bet for number three, and Avatar and Jurassic Park competing for the next two spots, with the question whether the $200 million production that grossed nearly $900 million, or the possibly $400 million movie that grossed $1.5 billion, had the bigger margin between outlay and revenue. My guess is that Avatar would come out ahead, but not by all that much. Meanwhile it is not wholly out of the question that there might be competition for the number five position from the horror film The Conjuring: The Last Rites, again because of its having made its more modest sum on a (much) smaller budget (the $55 million production taking in a half billion dollars).
Speaking of lower-budgeted films I imagine that the low-cost, high-grossing The Housemaid would make the top ten (as far down as the list usually goes these days), and probably do better than the bottom as it comes in ahead of higher-grossing but much higher-budgeted movies (having pulled in $400 million on a $35 million budget). Final Destination: Bloodlines, which made somewhat less while costing only somewhat more ($318 million on a $50 million budget) could also place in the top ten. This is because when we look to the more conventional, non-horror blockbusters we see a crop of films that cost as much as the biggest movies but made not much more than The Conjuring--the live-action How to Train Your Dragon, F1: The Movie, Superman, The Fantastic Four: First Steps all priced at $200 million+, and Wicked: For Good perhaps not much less ($150 million is the figure we hear quoted), even as their grosses were all in the $520-$630 million range. I imagine that films from this lot would fill what gaps in the top ten the aforementioned movies leave, but again find the competition among them for the few remaining spots in those lower ranks too close to be worth calling.
As to the separate "small budgets, big profits" list, it seems to me easy to picture, per the norm of recent years, horror films once again king in 2025. Sinners, which in spite of its real North American success, made too little internationally and cost too much for the top ten would also not be represented here because its $90 million+ disqualifies it from "small budget," all as I have a hard time seeing the relatively high cost and not so high-grossing 28 Years Later appearing here either. However, should the final Final Destination miss the top ten list it would certainly be present, as would Weapons, Black Phone 2--and maybe Five Nights at Freddy's 2
Where the flops are concerned--well, there happen to be no shortage of candidates here. The live-action Snow White would probably headline the list--but Tron: Ares, which made even less while possibly costing about as much, ought to be competitive, and failing its getting the #1 position a solid contender for the #2 spot. Elio, which cost $150 million and only grossed $150 million, could be competitive with Tron. And I wonder about the two lower-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe films that year, The Thunderbolts and Captain America 4, given their $400 million takes and very high budgets. Certainly if Captain America 4 was as expensive as some say ($380 million!) it might actually head the list. Otherwise the two movies might squeak past the break-even point. Still, it would seem that just as Disney could seem to have had a sensational year with Zootopia and Lilo & Stitch (and Avatar) it also took a beating with these other five films in a perfect demonstration of the way that its sticking to the ruthless adherence to the franchise strategy that had it cranking out billion-dollar hits assembly-line style in the '10s (with seven in 2019 alone) that so impressed the Ben Fritzes of the entertainment press is today yielding very uneven results.
Saturday, August 8, 2026
Why Has There Been No Deadline Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament 2025?
For many of those who follow the box office these days Deadline magazine's annual Most Valuable Blockbuster "tournament"--their analysts' report ranking Hollywood's biggest profit- and loss-makers during the preceding year, colorfully organized as the film business' equivalent of March Madness (complete with the capping of the tournament illustrated with a photo-shopped picture of the "MVB"'s director(s) making a slam dunk)--is something of an eventual event. However, at the time of this writing it is mid-July without 2025's tournament even having started, or even any sign that it ever will start.
I don't have any inside info here. But I also think there is a very obvious possible explanation--namely that amid the present hard times for Hollywood, and the big studio buyouts, there is more than the usual squeamishness about shining a spotlight on the facts of the situation, certainly at a Hollywood "Establishment" publication like the Penske-owned magazine Deadline. After all, just consider the history of the "tournament." Deadline first held a tournament for 2013 (the following March madness season, of course) and then held one annually thereafter for the next six straight years (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. There were no tournaments for the next two years (2020 and 2021) because of the extreme disruption of the box office by the pandemic, but the magazine resumed the tradition with a tournament for 2022, and continued with tournaments for 2023 and 2024.
Of course, the gross in 2022 was just a bit over half the pre-pandemic norm when adjusted for inflation. However, that was an immense improvement over 2020-2021, with the performance of the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels especially reassuring to those hoping business would soon return to normal by showing that would-be blockbusters could still reap ten figure grosses; attribute the fact that it hadn't in 2022 was a matter of the year's having fewer big movies out than usual; and expect that with the following year's "normal"-sized release slate of big movies the box office would zoom back to where it had been before COVID-19, and everyone be able to look back on the blow the pandemic dealt the movie business as something they had all got over, with 2022 a milestone in the recovery. (We did it! Yay us!) However, it didn't work out that way, with 2023, in spite of being far more packed with big movies, not seeing Hollywood gross much more than it did in 2022, the packed slate instead producing a very large number of severe underperformers. (Remember the DCEU's The Flash? The Marvels? Indiana Jones 5?)
Taking in the picture at year's end I argued that the box office of 2023 bespoke structural changes in the market, specifically that American movie going had fallen for the long haul (from 3-4 per capita movie ticket sales to not much more than 2); that this meant as many movies as before were chasing perhaps just two-thirds as many dollars; that big franchise films especially were going to have a rough time not only because of their high budgets, but because those billion-dollar grosses depended on their drawing the casual moviegoer not so easily won now; that in fact if you wanted people to use one of their two trips to the theater this year for your movie, so to speak, you had to really excite them by offering something they really, really wanted rather than grinding out more sequels and prequels no one ever asked for--perhaps something "completely different." (Thus was it the case that without the non-franchise films Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, and less expected hits from an animated Super Mario Bros. film to a Taylor Swift concert film, the unenviable situation would have been even worse still.)
Of course, that wasn't what the Hollywood Establishment wanted to hear, and so everyone who talked that way was ignored (and not only when they were doing so on a humble blog like this one). Instead said Establishment preferred to scapegoat Hollywood's workers, whining about the strikes and the way they delayed some releases and undermined publicity for others--and speak "adults in the room" stupidities about Marvel's underperformance a matter of their having failed to get "better" writers and "supervise" their directors properly, which their lickspittle courtiers in the relevant corners of the press faithfully conveyed to the public in the time-honored propaganda model manner of takers of brass checks for service rendered everywhere. They also continued to cleave to these idiocies through 2024, because if that year saw the box office slip from what it had been in 2023 there was a thinner release slate due to strike-era disruptions (for which, of course, they again blamed the workers), while, at least at a glance, the list of movies that did make money was dominated by franchise films per usual, with a few of them especially encouraging to those who wanted to go on working in the same old way, particularly the animated sequel Inside Out 2, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Sure that this meant Hollywood could go back to and sustain pre-pandemic grosses with sequels to the same old franchises that no one ever asked for, the media cheered "Marvel's back!" as Disney-Marvel announced a new crop of Super Russo Brothers-directed installments of The Avengers.
Not so fast, I said, strongly suspecting that Deadpool & Wolverine was an anomaly and an outlier, and no proof of the broad demand for Marvel movies on which the Universe's backers were banking, or for that matter, any of the rest of what Hollywood was so eager to sell. But of course that wasn't what the Establishment wanted to hear that any more than they did what we had to say about 2023, and so while many of us were perfectly capable of guessing what 2025 would really be like (another 2023-like pre-pandemic slate launched into the shrunken 2025 market to chase its smaller pool of dollars held by pickier moviegoers) the Hollywood Establishment were all shocked, shocked I tells ya when 2025 gave the lie to the industry "optimism" of the preceding years, that 2023 was a fluke, that for all its troubles 2024 showed things were getting back on track, that franchise movies were still the thing, that "Marvel's back!" because it wasn't, as Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts and the third-time-isn't-the-charm Fantastic Four film all proved, as 2025 saw theaters take in even less money than 2024 in real terms, and as a result actually make 2023 look like a good year by comparison. Indeed, even Establishment-approved commentators were starting to say "It's starting to look like the market maybe isn't going back to what it was before the pandemic . . ."
That 2025 dealt that optimism such a blow has not made the editors of publications like Deadline more eager to dig into the business' numbers, and if anything less so. Especially as 2025 piled yet another terrible year atop a half decade of on the whole atrocious ones, pushing the business closer to the brink, maybe very close indeed (however little the entertainment press admits it). Given the debt the studios had amassed even before the pandemic and the higher interest rates of the last few years, given the abundance of dodgy accounting (just consider how all those streaming revenues involve related-party deals, and the mysteries of "back catalog" value, and how often we hear a film cost far more than the studio initially admitted), I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Todd's post-Enron prediction of a massive write-down of the values of American business. Todd's prediction didn't come to pass at the time--but ever since it has felt as if it could, with Hollywood seeming to me an especially likely candidate between its vulnerabilities and all that was happening. Meanwhile the assault on Tinseltown by the swaggering "move fast and break things" idiots of Silicon Valley, which has seen a certain shiny-headed space rocket-launching individual who, if no match for Ernst Stavro Blofeld when it comes to sophistication, did what Blofeld could not by getting control of James Bond, while we all now have to look at Larry Ellison's ungulate's rear end of a face all the time because of his family's not just taking over Paramount and all connected with it, but trying to take over Warner Bros. too (as they lamely tell us that really they're not building a monopoly--Heavens no!--but saving us from one, because Netflix, with the media as obsequious as usual in repeating after them).
Still, those interested in these matters are hardly lost without Deadline's tournament, as you could probably come pretty close to what they would offer you by applying some basic rules of thumb to some fairly widely circulated information. Just remember the difference between studio net and gross on the production budget and the grain of salt with which one should accordingly take reports of figures not clearly identifying the measure; that the studios lay out a large sum beyond the production budget on the promotion and distribution of the film (sometimes as much as they spend on its production, but these days usually significantly less--the studios less prolific than before with their outlay here); that movie studios usually end up with a little under half of the reported theatrical gross; that they make a sum equivalent to 50-100 percent of that in the relatively short term from video, streaming, broadcast rights, etc., to go on top of the net (more in the case of low-grossing films, less in the case of high-grossers); and you have a rough and ready formula for broadly computing how a movie did. Thus the makers of a $150 million (net) movie probably spent $75-$150 million spent over and above the production to get it seen, meaning a net outlay of $225-$300 million. The result is that the movie could break even on as little as $225 million grossed and $110 million or so netted in the theater--yes, that little, because even if that still leaves the movie in the red the video, etc. may provide the minimum required to staunch the gap. Meanwhile if the movie pulls in $300 million it is on still surer ground, at $400 million one can be confident that it has at least broken even, and at $500 million a healthy profit is very probable, with said profit only growing north of that point (though who gets a hold of it might be up for argument, if a star got a Tom Cruise-in-Top Gun-2-like deal), with the rest likely to be a matter of the fine details, not unimportant, not without their share of surprises, but in the end unlikely to alter the big picture quite so much (e.g. "Will Megalopolis be #2 or #4 on the year's biggest flops list?"), and certainly that as given the public by the folks at Deadline.
I don't have any inside info here. But I also think there is a very obvious possible explanation--namely that amid the present hard times for Hollywood, and the big studio buyouts, there is more than the usual squeamishness about shining a spotlight on the facts of the situation, certainly at a Hollywood "Establishment" publication like the Penske-owned magazine Deadline. After all, just consider the history of the "tournament." Deadline first held a tournament for 2013 (the following March madness season, of course) and then held one annually thereafter for the next six straight years (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. There were no tournaments for the next two years (2020 and 2021) because of the extreme disruption of the box office by the pandemic, but the magazine resumed the tradition with a tournament for 2022, and continued with tournaments for 2023 and 2024.
Of course, the gross in 2022 was just a bit over half the pre-pandemic norm when adjusted for inflation. However, that was an immense improvement over 2020-2021, with the performance of the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels especially reassuring to those hoping business would soon return to normal by showing that would-be blockbusters could still reap ten figure grosses; attribute the fact that it hadn't in 2022 was a matter of the year's having fewer big movies out than usual; and expect that with the following year's "normal"-sized release slate of big movies the box office would zoom back to where it had been before COVID-19, and everyone be able to look back on the blow the pandemic dealt the movie business as something they had all got over, with 2022 a milestone in the recovery. (We did it! Yay us!) However, it didn't work out that way, with 2023, in spite of being far more packed with big movies, not seeing Hollywood gross much more than it did in 2022, the packed slate instead producing a very large number of severe underperformers. (Remember the DCEU's The Flash? The Marvels? Indiana Jones 5?)
Taking in the picture at year's end I argued that the box office of 2023 bespoke structural changes in the market, specifically that American movie going had fallen for the long haul (from 3-4 per capita movie ticket sales to not much more than 2); that this meant as many movies as before were chasing perhaps just two-thirds as many dollars; that big franchise films especially were going to have a rough time not only because of their high budgets, but because those billion-dollar grosses depended on their drawing the casual moviegoer not so easily won now; that in fact if you wanted people to use one of their two trips to the theater this year for your movie, so to speak, you had to really excite them by offering something they really, really wanted rather than grinding out more sequels and prequels no one ever asked for--perhaps something "completely different." (Thus was it the case that without the non-franchise films Barbie and Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, and less expected hits from an animated Super Mario Bros. film to a Taylor Swift concert film, the unenviable situation would have been even worse still.)
Of course, that wasn't what the Hollywood Establishment wanted to hear, and so everyone who talked that way was ignored (and not only when they were doing so on a humble blog like this one). Instead said Establishment preferred to scapegoat Hollywood's workers, whining about the strikes and the way they delayed some releases and undermined publicity for others--and speak "adults in the room" stupidities about Marvel's underperformance a matter of their having failed to get "better" writers and "supervise" their directors properly, which their lickspittle courtiers in the relevant corners of the press faithfully conveyed to the public in the time-honored propaganda model manner of takers of brass checks for service rendered everywhere. They also continued to cleave to these idiocies through 2024, because if that year saw the box office slip from what it had been in 2023 there was a thinner release slate due to strike-era disruptions (for which, of course, they again blamed the workers), while, at least at a glance, the list of movies that did make money was dominated by franchise films per usual, with a few of them especially encouraging to those who wanted to go on working in the same old way, particularly the animated sequel Inside Out 2, and Deadpool & Wolverine. Sure that this meant Hollywood could go back to and sustain pre-pandemic grosses with sequels to the same old franchises that no one ever asked for, the media cheered "Marvel's back!" as Disney-Marvel announced a new crop of Super Russo Brothers-directed installments of The Avengers.
Not so fast, I said, strongly suspecting that Deadpool & Wolverine was an anomaly and an outlier, and no proof of the broad demand for Marvel movies on which the Universe's backers were banking, or for that matter, any of the rest of what Hollywood was so eager to sell. But of course that wasn't what the Establishment wanted to hear that any more than they did what we had to say about 2023, and so while many of us were perfectly capable of guessing what 2025 would really be like (another 2023-like pre-pandemic slate launched into the shrunken 2025 market to chase its smaller pool of dollars held by pickier moviegoers) the Hollywood Establishment were all shocked, shocked I tells ya when 2025 gave the lie to the industry "optimism" of the preceding years, that 2023 was a fluke, that for all its troubles 2024 showed things were getting back on track, that franchise movies were still the thing, that "Marvel's back!" because it wasn't, as Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts and the third-time-isn't-the-charm Fantastic Four film all proved, as 2025 saw theaters take in even less money than 2024 in real terms, and as a result actually make 2023 look like a good year by comparison. Indeed, even Establishment-approved commentators were starting to say "It's starting to look like the market maybe isn't going back to what it was before the pandemic . . ."
That 2025 dealt that optimism such a blow has not made the editors of publications like Deadline more eager to dig into the business' numbers, and if anything less so. Especially as 2025 piled yet another terrible year atop a half decade of on the whole atrocious ones, pushing the business closer to the brink, maybe very close indeed (however little the entertainment press admits it). Given the debt the studios had amassed even before the pandemic and the higher interest rates of the last few years, given the abundance of dodgy accounting (just consider how all those streaming revenues involve related-party deals, and the mysteries of "back catalog" value, and how often we hear a film cost far more than the studio initially admitted), I found myself thinking of Emmanuel Todd's post-Enron prediction of a massive write-down of the values of American business. Todd's prediction didn't come to pass at the time--but ever since it has felt as if it could, with Hollywood seeming to me an especially likely candidate between its vulnerabilities and all that was happening. Meanwhile the assault on Tinseltown by the swaggering "move fast and break things" idiots of Silicon Valley, which has seen a certain shiny-headed space rocket-launching individual who, if no match for Ernst Stavro Blofeld when it comes to sophistication, did what Blofeld could not by getting control of James Bond, while we all now have to look at Larry Ellison's ungulate's rear end of a face all the time because of his family's not just taking over Paramount and all connected with it, but trying to take over Warner Bros. too (as they lamely tell us that really they're not building a monopoly--Heavens no!--but saving us from one, because Netflix, with the media as obsequious as usual in repeating after them).
Still, those interested in these matters are hardly lost without Deadline's tournament, as you could probably come pretty close to what they would offer you by applying some basic rules of thumb to some fairly widely circulated information. Just remember the difference between studio net and gross on the production budget and the grain of salt with which one should accordingly take reports of figures not clearly identifying the measure; that the studios lay out a large sum beyond the production budget on the promotion and distribution of the film (sometimes as much as they spend on its production, but these days usually significantly less--the studios less prolific than before with their outlay here); that movie studios usually end up with a little under half of the reported theatrical gross; that they make a sum equivalent to 50-100 percent of that in the relatively short term from video, streaming, broadcast rights, etc., to go on top of the net (more in the case of low-grossing films, less in the case of high-grossers); and you have a rough and ready formula for broadly computing how a movie did. Thus the makers of a $150 million (net) movie probably spent $75-$150 million spent over and above the production to get it seen, meaning a net outlay of $225-$300 million. The result is that the movie could break even on as little as $225 million grossed and $110 million or so netted in the theater--yes, that little, because even if that still leaves the movie in the red the video, etc. may provide the minimum required to staunch the gap. Meanwhile if the movie pulls in $300 million it is on still surer ground, at $400 million one can be confident that it has at least broken even, and at $500 million a healthy profit is very probable, with said profit only growing north of that point (though who gets a hold of it might be up for argument, if a star got a Tom Cruise-in-Top Gun-2-like deal), with the rest likely to be a matter of the fine details, not unimportant, not without their share of surprises, but in the end unlikely to alter the big picture quite so much (e.g. "Will Megalopolis be #2 or #4 on the year's biggest flops list?"), and certainly that as given the public by the folks at Deadline.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu: Thoughts on the Box Office
Of course, all that came to an end with the unfortunate prequel 2018 release Solo. In the wake of that flop Disney shelved its bigger plans, and completed only one more Star Wars film, the last of the new trilogy begun with Episode VII in 2015, which brought in another billion-dollar gross but looked far from being the king of a year dominated by the climax to another cycle about which people seemed far more excited, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's culmination in Phase Three's finale, Avengers: Endgame (a nearly three-billion dollar hit that claimed the all-time box office champion crown!), and even such other hits as the live-action adaptation of The Lion King--just "another franchise" among many in a box office where what had originally been novel about the Star Wars series had since become commonplace. As if that were not enough, the shock to everything Hollywood did by the pandemic (and one might add, the strikes of 2023) compounded the shock of the aforementioned box office reversals, producing a long dry spell in which "actually existing" new Star Wars stories were confined to small screen streaming series' (where, if the economics are comparatively opaque, one would presume them to have flourished given how prolific Disney's investment in them has been), until, following the announcement of many Star Wars projects that just never panned out (new Star Wars movies by Rian Johnson and Taika Waititi and Patty Jenkins and James Mangold, the Suits apparently asking "Who's hot right now?" and dropping their projects when they ceased to be hot, in the main because of their can't-work-within-someone-else's-franchise-because-I-am-an-arteest! auteur pretensions, inability to understand the material with which they are to work, and general stupidity, as we saw with The Last Jedi, Thor 4, Wonder Woman: 1984 and Indiana Jones 5), we finally got Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu in May 2026.
Did the new movie mark the return of Star Wars to the top of the box office? Alas, no. Indeed, it didn't even get near the billion-dollar mark, its run apparently sputtering out with just a third that sum banked, less than what Solo made back in 2018 even before we adjust for inflation--and all that, I might add, in a patch of the summer where the competition was not too strong. (It certainly wasn't as if Masters of the Universe was sucking the air out of the box office with roaring ticket sales!) Still, if one cannot call Mandalorian and Grogu a sensational performer, and indeed would be justified in regarding it as a disappointment showing how far Star Wars has fallen as a commercial force, one may be mistaken in calling it a money-loser. After all, knowing that Star Wars is just "another franchise," and at that one a half century old and very intensively (sometimes erratically) mined in recent years, its backers do not seem to have counted on its being a box office champion. Accordingly the budget, if far from small, indeed fairly respectable for a major summer release ($165 million!), was still more modest than those of many of its predecessors--a smaller production released with lower expectations that even with the far from stellar gross may well see the movie at least break even when the post-theatrical revenue is taken into account (coming on top of the $170 million or so likely to have been netted theatrically, something north of $300 million plausible, quite enough to cover not just the cost of the production but the marketing/distribution costs as well, and plausibly even turn a profit). Moreover, this particular movie had a stronger claim than most films to being judged by more than its box office given its role in shoring up the TV empire of which it is a tie-in, the back catalog value of one of the biggest franchises in history (in this case, not to be trivialized), and the merchandising value of all things related to it (which is, again, a very big deal in Star Wars' case). The result is that if the makers of Mandalorian and Grogu may reasonably have hoped for more than they got in the way of ticket sales not only may they be better than dissatisfied with the result, but, as they clearly hope that Shawn Levy, who unlike so many of the arteests to whom Disney turned in the past shown that he knows how to thrill the fan base of a creaking franchise, will score again the way he did in 2024 when Star Wars: Starfighter hits theaters a year after Mandalorian did, Memorial Day weekend 2027--and if all concerned are very, very lucky, helping establish a tradition of Memorial Day Star Wars movies, just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe did of new Marvel superhero movies on the opening weekend in May for so many years.
The New Live-Action He-Man Film: A Commercial View
I can't say that I paid much attention to the publicity attending the making and release of the live-action He-Man movie. Aside from having not paid real attention to that particular franchise for a very long time (I gave it almost no thought between the early 2000s Cartoon Network edition going off the air and the strange experience of running into a Heritage Foundation review of Kevin Smith's sequel series), it increasingly seems to me that cartoons should generally be left as cartoons rather than transformed into live-action projects where, as we are reminded again and again, much that "worked" in animated form doesn't in the live-action version and as a result either gets mutilated or chucked out or kept but only annoys everybody in doing so. Indeed, with Spider-Man having demonstrated that an animated Hollywood action movie can make real money, and the downward pressure on studio bottom lines of recent years providing an additional incentive to go the animation route (yes, you can save money this way), the studios seem to have less excuse than ever to continue along their make-the-cartoon-a-live-action-movie path not only from an artistic perspective, but the crass commercial one that is the only one the Suited vulgarians really care about, and that if they had any business sense (never mind artistic sense) they would make cartoons about cartoons as they devote their live-action filmmaking efforts to movies about, you know, people.
Meanwhile, the problems with this kind of adaptation generally aside it seemed to me that giving He-Man specifically this treatment was a dubious commercial prospect. So far as I can tell this is not a franchise whose runners have renewed their fan base by winning younger followers (as against, for instance, the evergreen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), which means that middle-aged folks are the ones who have any attachment to it, all as from the standpoint of the practicalities of exploiting a largely mined-out '80s nostalgia getting those who were kids in the '80s to go to the theater for The Power of Grayskull is probably trickier than getting them to go to the theater to satisfy the Need for Speed. In reality Top Gun may be no smarter or more "adult" as viewing goes than the stuff of a kid's cartoon from the '80s, indeed, is in many respects is less so. (Children's show that it was He-Man did in its stronger episodes rise above the same-good-guys-thrash-the-same-bad-guys-in-every-episode format, and if anything espoused a more mature value system and world-view, not least in regard to war, than the cheap pop militarism that made Top Gun such an Establishment darling.) Still, our assorted cultural prejudices mean that middle-aged dudes are probably a lot less embarrassed about buying a ticket to see Tom Cruise jump into a jet than one to see a muscleman yell "I HAVE THE POWER!" Additionally the kind of hysterical media cheerleading Top Gun 2 had on its side in the summer of '22, and which made a difference in its prospects as important as it is overlooked by the vast majority of the commentariat was not to be expected on He-Man's behalf.
But the inherently ill-conceived character of cartoon-to-live-action adaptation generally and longshot character of this project in particular weren't enough for the folks making the movie, as I found out coming into contact with the publicity for the film. Did they seriously make another live-action He-Man movie where the characters spend the movie in our world instead of Eternia, even though the fans hated that about the cheapo Cannon Films movie from '87? Yes they did--while even bringing Dolph "I have all the acting range and charisma of the solidified contents of a septic tank" Lundgren as if being reminded of his part in that unfortunate film would delight fans. (You go in for such metafictional evocation when there is affection for the old version, not when there isn't.) Did they seriously decide to make the He-Man movie a "male Barbie?" Yes they did, either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that men didn't exactly love Greta Gerwig's pour-gasoline-on-the-fire-of-the-wretched-kulturkampf epic about a fashion doll, and that those who go in for nostalgia for '80s action cartoons could be expected to have loved it less than most--the executives' "monkey see, monkey do" compulsion to imitate the nearest success simply too overwhelming for those calling the shots. Did they build this Masters-of-the-Universe-characters-running-about-on-our Earth, Dolph Lundgren-presenting, Barbie treatment on a thematic foundation of "woke gender" politics-flavored-subversion-of–the-franchise-cum-steaming-pile-of-self-help-crapola? Yes they "I'm Just Ken" did. Did the very expensive feature film these "creative decisions" produced flop hard? Yes it has, the $200 million production predictably opening with under $30 million in North America in its first Friday-to-Sunday period, and plummeting seventy percent from that low level in its second weekend on the way to a feeble final domestic tally of barely twice its opening gross ($65 million--no, good word-of-mouth did not save this one by making it "leggy"), all as it made even less money overseas on the way to a final worldwide gross in the $115 million range. A veritable box office disaster (a nine figure loss a near-certainty given the numbers we know), it reminds all who needed reminding that, however much their courtiers in the press tell us the people in the C-Suites are the smartest guys in the room, they are actually the dumbest guys in any room. Still, even seeing the film prove commercially dead on arrival I thought to myself that we might not have seen the summer's biggest flop yet as, once again, badly battered yet absolutely unteachable Hollywood releases a pre-pandemic roster of would-be blockbusters into the shrunken post-pandemic/forever COVID movie market. And indeed, as I write now (in mid-July) it seems that if the folks at Deadline are braver about holding a Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament for 2026 than they have been holding one for 2025 that other animated-to-live-action flop Moana (not Disney's first, likely not to be its last), and Supergirl, will make the rankings on the flops' list "competitive."
Meanwhile, the problems with this kind of adaptation generally aside it seemed to me that giving He-Man specifically this treatment was a dubious commercial prospect. So far as I can tell this is not a franchise whose runners have renewed their fan base by winning younger followers (as against, for instance, the evergreen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), which means that middle-aged folks are the ones who have any attachment to it, all as from the standpoint of the practicalities of exploiting a largely mined-out '80s nostalgia getting those who were kids in the '80s to go to the theater for The Power of Grayskull is probably trickier than getting them to go to the theater to satisfy the Need for Speed. In reality Top Gun may be no smarter or more "adult" as viewing goes than the stuff of a kid's cartoon from the '80s, indeed, is in many respects is less so. (Children's show that it was He-Man did in its stronger episodes rise above the same-good-guys-thrash-the-same-bad-guys-in-every-episode format, and if anything espoused a more mature value system and world-view, not least in regard to war, than the cheap pop militarism that made Top Gun such an Establishment darling.) Still, our assorted cultural prejudices mean that middle-aged dudes are probably a lot less embarrassed about buying a ticket to see Tom Cruise jump into a jet than one to see a muscleman yell "I HAVE THE POWER!" Additionally the kind of hysterical media cheerleading Top Gun 2 had on its side in the summer of '22, and which made a difference in its prospects as important as it is overlooked by the vast majority of the commentariat was not to be expected on He-Man's behalf.
But the inherently ill-conceived character of cartoon-to-live-action adaptation generally and longshot character of this project in particular weren't enough for the folks making the movie, as I found out coming into contact with the publicity for the film. Did they seriously make another live-action He-Man movie where the characters spend the movie in our world instead of Eternia, even though the fans hated that about the cheapo Cannon Films movie from '87? Yes they did--while even bringing Dolph "I have all the acting range and charisma of the solidified contents of a septic tank" Lundgren as if being reminded of his part in that unfortunate film would delight fans. (You go in for such metafictional evocation when there is affection for the old version, not when there isn't.) Did they seriously decide to make the He-Man movie a "male Barbie?" Yes they did, either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that men didn't exactly love Greta Gerwig's pour-gasoline-on-the-fire-of-the-wretched-kulturkampf epic about a fashion doll, and that those who go in for nostalgia for '80s action cartoons could be expected to have loved it less than most--the executives' "monkey see, monkey do" compulsion to imitate the nearest success simply too overwhelming for those calling the shots. Did they build this Masters-of-the-Universe-characters-running-about-on-our Earth, Dolph Lundgren-presenting, Barbie treatment on a thematic foundation of "woke gender" politics-flavored-subversion-of–the-franchise-cum-steaming-pile-of-self-help-crapola? Yes they "I'm Just Ken" did. Did the very expensive feature film these "creative decisions" produced flop hard? Yes it has, the $200 million production predictably opening with under $30 million in North America in its first Friday-to-Sunday period, and plummeting seventy percent from that low level in its second weekend on the way to a feeble final domestic tally of barely twice its opening gross ($65 million--no, good word-of-mouth did not save this one by making it "leggy"), all as it made even less money overseas on the way to a final worldwide gross in the $115 million range. A veritable box office disaster (a nine figure loss a near-certainty given the numbers we know), it reminds all who needed reminding that, however much their courtiers in the press tell us the people in the C-Suites are the smartest guys in the room, they are actually the dumbest guys in any room. Still, even seeing the film prove commercially dead on arrival I thought to myself that we might not have seen the summer's biggest flop yet as, once again, badly battered yet absolutely unteachable Hollywood releases a pre-pandemic roster of would-be blockbusters into the shrunken post-pandemic/forever COVID movie market. And indeed, as I write now (in mid-July) it seems that if the folks at Deadline are braver about holding a Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament for 2026 than they have been holding one for 2025 that other animated-to-live-action flop Moana (not Disney's first, likely not to be its last), and Supergirl, will make the rankings on the flops' list "competitive."
2026 at the Box Office: Is it 2023 All Over Again?
As I have been saying for years now 2023 was a very revealing year where the shape of the North American box office was concerned, specifically confirming that the "post-pandemic" box office is structurally much smaller than it was before the pandemic (per capita ticket sales down from 3-4 to just 2 a year); would have rather less casual movie going of the kind that helped power so many franchise films to billion-dollar grosses (by bringing out more than the hardcore fans); that the release of a pre-pandemic-style slate of big-budget movies in the new market would result in a number of underperformers comparable to what we saw in that disastrous year (the year of The Marvels, the year of The Flash); and that the winners likely to be more carefully targeted films to which a lazy, risk-shy Hollywood is generally averse (as Barbie triumphed where The Marvels failed, Oppenheimer where The Flash did). It also seemed to me that 2024 and 2025 validated that reading of the situation, and that given what we knew of the year's slate of movies 2026 only promised a repeat.
Still, I have to admit myself a bit surprised by just how closely 2026 has followed after the pattern of 2023 in respects. Once again the year had a lift at its beginning from an Avatar sequel, and at Easter saw the release of an Illumination Studios Super Mario Bros. animated movie that, while reviled by critics, may well prove the year's biggest earner--after which things went south. Once again we have seen franchise films flop one after another through the summer, in many cases the same franchises in the same ways, with Disney seeing a Lucasfilm franchise-based film and a live-action adaptation of a prior animated hit (with a nautical theme!) both underperform (Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu and Moana in place of Indiana Jones 5 and The Little Mermaid). Once again we have seen a DCEU superhero film and a kulturkampfer-hated female-led superhero film flop big time (with Supergirl pulling double-duty for The Flash and The Marvels). Once again we have Christopher Nolan coming to the rescue with what would conventionally seem a rather unlikely blockbuster in its period setting and other ways in late July (with The Odyssey filling in for Oppenheimer). And once again in spite of such bright spots we have a movie season, and a cinematic year, on track to merely repeat the depressing post-pandemic pattern of big-budget failure and all-around lower grossers, with the fact that the summer season of 2023 is so much like the summer season of 2026 testament to the fact that if Hollywood has shown itself prepared to adapt in small ways (reining in its spending, taking a new interest in video game adaptations, etc.) it remains as rigid as ever in the big, still committed to the blockbuster model of filmmaking whose day it refuses to acknowledge as done because it finds the obvious alternative of actually putting in an effort so unpalatable.
Not that that's what you'll read if you pay attention to the entertainment press. At present they are pushing the narrative that this time, for reals, it's a year of recovery, with Hollywood looking at possibly having its "first $10 billion box office since 2019." Their claims are not wholly baseless, given that the box office took in $4.7 billion in the first six months of the year (as against the $4.1 billion of the prior year), such that if the pattern were to continue, with a little help from the various franchise films from which the Hollywood Establishment hopes for much (besides Spider-Man, also Dune, Jumanji and The Avengers, among others), yes, they might make $10 billion. However, they entirely overlook how if a good sound bite a $10 billion box office year is no sign of return to the pre-pandemic box office. After all, in the late '10s, with the norm grosses in the $11-$12 billion range, $10 billion would have been a bitter disappointment, even before (going by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index) inflation meant that the 2015-2019 norm was more like $15 billion in today's terms--this the mark that would really mean a return to pre-pandemic norms. Indeed, as the mathematically literate know full well, because of inflation a $10 billion gross in 2026 would only equal what Hollywood made in that disastrous year of 2023 I have been talking about--its $8.9 billion box office, because of those price rises, at least $9.7 billion in June 2026 dollars (all as, certainly to go by the priorities of those in charge, we have six more inflationary months ahead of us). The result is that rather than happy days being here again the post-pandemic/forever COVID box office would remain with us, with 2026's improvement over 2025, in its simply matching 2023's take, merely bespeaking the lowering of the bar, as it suggests the high end of the range of fluctuation of the market amid the "new normal."
All as, of course, that $10 billion is not yet actually in the till. With nearly five months left to go at this point, with the underperformance of franchise films of the expected types having continued through this year (I say again, Star Wars, DCEU, Disney animation-to-live-action); all as some of the franchise films up ahead seem like quite the gamble (2025 was a reminder that the Marvel Cinematic Universe ain't what it used to be as a box office draw, and Dune 3 a tougher sell as a mass-audience hit than its predecessors); one would be naïve to rule out the studios meeting with any more nasty surprises in 2026--such that come January the entertainment press may be telling a very different story.
Still, I have to admit myself a bit surprised by just how closely 2026 has followed after the pattern of 2023 in respects. Once again the year had a lift at its beginning from an Avatar sequel, and at Easter saw the release of an Illumination Studios Super Mario Bros. animated movie that, while reviled by critics, may well prove the year's biggest earner--after which things went south. Once again we have seen franchise films flop one after another through the summer, in many cases the same franchises in the same ways, with Disney seeing a Lucasfilm franchise-based film and a live-action adaptation of a prior animated hit (with a nautical theme!) both underperform (Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu and Moana in place of Indiana Jones 5 and The Little Mermaid). Once again we have seen a DCEU superhero film and a kulturkampfer-hated female-led superhero film flop big time (with Supergirl pulling double-duty for The Flash and The Marvels). Once again we have Christopher Nolan coming to the rescue with what would conventionally seem a rather unlikely blockbuster in its period setting and other ways in late July (with The Odyssey filling in for Oppenheimer). And once again in spite of such bright spots we have a movie season, and a cinematic year, on track to merely repeat the depressing post-pandemic pattern of big-budget failure and all-around lower grossers, with the fact that the summer season of 2023 is so much like the summer season of 2026 testament to the fact that if Hollywood has shown itself prepared to adapt in small ways (reining in its spending, taking a new interest in video game adaptations, etc.) it remains as rigid as ever in the big, still committed to the blockbuster model of filmmaking whose day it refuses to acknowledge as done because it finds the obvious alternative of actually putting in an effort so unpalatable.
Not that that's what you'll read if you pay attention to the entertainment press. At present they are pushing the narrative that this time, for reals, it's a year of recovery, with Hollywood looking at possibly having its "first $10 billion box office since 2019." Their claims are not wholly baseless, given that the box office took in $4.7 billion in the first six months of the year (as against the $4.1 billion of the prior year), such that if the pattern were to continue, with a little help from the various franchise films from which the Hollywood Establishment hopes for much (besides Spider-Man, also Dune, Jumanji and The Avengers, among others), yes, they might make $10 billion. However, they entirely overlook how if a good sound bite a $10 billion box office year is no sign of return to the pre-pandemic box office. After all, in the late '10s, with the norm grosses in the $11-$12 billion range, $10 billion would have been a bitter disappointment, even before (going by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index) inflation meant that the 2015-2019 norm was more like $15 billion in today's terms--this the mark that would really mean a return to pre-pandemic norms. Indeed, as the mathematically literate know full well, because of inflation a $10 billion gross in 2026 would only equal what Hollywood made in that disastrous year of 2023 I have been talking about--its $8.9 billion box office, because of those price rises, at least $9.7 billion in June 2026 dollars (all as, certainly to go by the priorities of those in charge, we have six more inflationary months ahead of us). The result is that rather than happy days being here again the post-pandemic/forever COVID box office would remain with us, with 2026's improvement over 2025, in its simply matching 2023's take, merely bespeaking the lowering of the bar, as it suggests the high end of the range of fluctuation of the market amid the "new normal."
All as, of course, that $10 billion is not yet actually in the till. With nearly five months left to go at this point, with the underperformance of franchise films of the expected types having continued through this year (I say again, Star Wars, DCEU, Disney animation-to-live-action); all as some of the franchise films up ahead seem like quite the gamble (2025 was a reminder that the Marvel Cinematic Universe ain't what it used to be as a box office draw, and Dune 3 a tougher sell as a mass-audience hit than its predecessors); one would be naïve to rule out the studios meeting with any more nasty surprises in 2026--such that come January the entertainment press may be telling a very different story.
Friday, July 10, 2026
The Shape of the Box Office of 2025
In assessing the 2025 box office my first thought was of how the reality stacked up against my predictions at the end of last year. In particular I was interested in checking whether or not, as I thought, the forecasts so many others had made regard the year's gross had not been overoptimistic; the year had hewed to the pattern I saw in 2023 which seemed likely to be repeated of a pre-pandemic release slate in a shrunken post-pandemic market (reduced by a third), with the result too many tentpoles for the number of ticket-buyers to go around, leading to a large number of disappointing grosses; the claim that "Marvel's Back!" in the wake of Deadpool's success in 2024 proved wrong-headed as that film proved to have borne out interest in Deadpool, not the Marvel brand as a whole as the year's three major Marvel theatrical releases underperformed; and in general, the year's grosses conformed to the impression I have had for many years of increasing superhero fatigue and sci-fi actioner fatigue and franchise fatigue and the decreasing viability of the Hollywood blockbuster strategy so reliant on them for so long. As it turned out, what seemed to me was likely to happen, did happen, with the year's gross, instead of the $9-$10 billion so many hoped for instead under $8.7 billion, thanks to a large number of underperforming films--not least the three Marvel releases that showed that Deadpool was the exception, not the rule, for the sinking ship that this onetime king of the franchises has become.
Now, with the inflation data for the year out I am looking at the numbers again a little more closely, not least for how those of 2025 compare with those of 2023-2024, and 2015-2018. Doing so affirms that 2025 saw a gross 1.5 percent down from that of 2024, when a strike-thinned release slate was supposed to have been responsible for the soft gross, and down 8 percent from that of 2023, when the slate was pretty packed--and thus a more suitable point of comparison for how 2025 really did. In the process the gross continued its slippage from the level of 2015-2019--the figure for 2025 just 58 percent of that level (as against 59 percent in 2024 and 63 percent in 2023), suggesting that even after the dramatic drop of the pandemic period (which had me estimating a structural shrinkage of about a third) the erosion is still quite visibly continuing, rather than the situation stabilizing, let alone any recovery ongoing in the way some in the entertainment press at least pretend to continue to hope in spite of the evidence of the numbers from year to year since the pandemic.
In the face of this trend does Hollywood have options? As I have been saying for two years now they would do better to make cost-effective, well-targeted films than to pour money into tentpoles that nobody asked for (and those who never asked for them ever more inclined to take a pass on them entirely), and also make the most of the international opportunities open to them (as perhaps they mean to do in China, to go by what Disney did with the Zootopia sequel). Still, the problem right now is far bigger than anything Hollywood does. So far as I am concerned no discussion of the matter of the weak film grosses we are seeing is at all complete without acknowledgment of the extreme financial stress the public finds itself under today, one reflection of which is its passing up on all sorts of little luxuries they took for granted in better times, like dining out, and going to concerts, and yes, taking in a movie in a theater rather than contenting themselves with the offerings available to them on littler screens--the "affordability crisis" about which, of course, government has done nothing and shows no interest in doing anything positive. Indeed, elite unwillingness to address the issue is only underlined by the ways in which they pretend to address them (as seen in Ezra Klein and company's feeble sales pitch for the economic and political stupidity that is the blatantly neoliberal "Abundance" agenda). As the last implies I see no grounds for expecting any improvement in that part of the sorry picture, with all that means for Hollywood's share in it.
Now, with the inflation data for the year out I am looking at the numbers again a little more closely, not least for how those of 2025 compare with those of 2023-2024, and 2015-2018. Doing so affirms that 2025 saw a gross 1.5 percent down from that of 2024, when a strike-thinned release slate was supposed to have been responsible for the soft gross, and down 8 percent from that of 2023, when the slate was pretty packed--and thus a more suitable point of comparison for how 2025 really did. In the process the gross continued its slippage from the level of 2015-2019--the figure for 2025 just 58 percent of that level (as against 59 percent in 2024 and 63 percent in 2023), suggesting that even after the dramatic drop of the pandemic period (which had me estimating a structural shrinkage of about a third) the erosion is still quite visibly continuing, rather than the situation stabilizing, let alone any recovery ongoing in the way some in the entertainment press at least pretend to continue to hope in spite of the evidence of the numbers from year to year since the pandemic.
In the face of this trend does Hollywood have options? As I have been saying for two years now they would do better to make cost-effective, well-targeted films than to pour money into tentpoles that nobody asked for (and those who never asked for them ever more inclined to take a pass on them entirely), and also make the most of the international opportunities open to them (as perhaps they mean to do in China, to go by what Disney did with the Zootopia sequel). Still, the problem right now is far bigger than anything Hollywood does. So far as I am concerned no discussion of the matter of the weak film grosses we are seeing is at all complete without acknowledgment of the extreme financial stress the public finds itself under today, one reflection of which is its passing up on all sorts of little luxuries they took for granted in better times, like dining out, and going to concerts, and yes, taking in a movie in a theater rather than contenting themselves with the offerings available to them on littler screens--the "affordability crisis" about which, of course, government has done nothing and shows no interest in doing anything positive. Indeed, elite unwillingness to address the issue is only underlined by the ways in which they pretend to address them (as seen in Ezra Klein and company's feeble sales pitch for the economic and political stupidity that is the blatantly neoliberal "Abundance" agenda). As the last implies I see no grounds for expecting any improvement in that part of the sorry picture, with all that means for Hollywood's share in it.
Whither the Jane Austen Fandom?
The question on my mind recently was just how long that would go on being the case. Fandom itself generally seems to be in decline, certainly going by what many say of the science fiction fandom, and the factors behind that--a result not just of the decadence of science fiction as a genre about which I have written so many times, but of how people generally experience our entertainment-saturated era. The conventional wisdom has it that, enjoying what is at least superficially a superabundance of choices, and not exactly encouraged to develop their attention spans, people sample a great many enthusiasms rather than immersing themselves very deeply in any of them--and one might add, favor the "relatable" over the pleasures of the exotic and faraway--so that the conditions and outlook that gave rise to the old-fashioned "fan" are a thing of the past.
If anything, the Jane Austen fandom would seem much more vulnerable. After all, it is ultimately print-based--the media adaptations of Austen's work numerous, but essentially secondary (does anyone consider someone who never read the books a genuine "Jane Austen fan?") at a time in which the habit of reading, and especially reading long works of fiction for pleasure, is in sharp decline. It also does not take much imagination to see that if even the most commercially-oriented contemporary work for young adults is not commanding the audience that it did a decade ago anything such as what Austen wrote is that much less likely to speak to their passions, as she not only writes of another era, but does so from within that other era, with its perspective and conventions, and with which they can have little patience, and which they can scarcely seem able to wrap their minds around. So does it go with, for example, that stress on chastity, propriety, reputation that plunged the Bennet family into crisis when one of their daughters ran off with Mr. Wickham, such that, as seen in the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice, the movie's makers had little choice but to greatly compress that very large and important part of the book at the cost of not just faithfulness to the original but the fabric of the drama--all as given their intent of reaching a really wide audience it was, again, natural for them to reimagine Elizabeth Bennet as a far more lively character than the original (her having a little more sensibility and a little less sense, so to speak). Indeed, that cliché of the depiction of the Austen fandom, the young woman picking up Pride and Prejudice and identifying with Elizabeth and being swept up in her story and swept away by it is something I find very hard to picture as a phenomenon of the 2020s--the more in as we are told that Bridgerton is more the present generation's speed. Bridgerton, of course, would never have become the phenomenon that it is without Austen and her less celebrated imitators and successors creating a genre of love stories romanticizing the Regency era so popular that an identity politics-obsessed Hollywood would give it its "makeover," but that fact does not necessarily translate into interest in the antecedents, certainly in a different medium, as written in and for another time. Just as those who enjoy today's space opera and superhero tales generally do not go back and look at the old pulp tales in which those forms were born, let alone become devoted to them, it seems to me that only very rarely will those enjoying wokefied twenty-first century versions of Regency romance on streaming pick up Austen's old books.
Instead the declining interest would seem likely to translate to the withering away of the old cohort of enthusiasts as, like so many giants of English and world letters who have become merely "obscure" names to even those who pass themselves off as literate today, just something they get assigned in school and never bother with again. At least, for as long as schools continue to assign their students literary reading--a practice that may well be on its way out in an era in which the Untermenschen who hold power at every turn show themselves out to kill the humanities, and indeed, humanity itself, in their Apocalypse-like chase after the godhood they and the media endlessly stroking them believe they deserve.
Is This Really an Age of Disclosure?
Hollywood producer Dan Farah's recent documentary The Age of Disclosure takes its name from the view held by some of those who believe governments have been concealing the reality behind reports of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). The "ufologist" as some call them generally assumes this to be hard evidence of visitations of the Earth by extraterrestrials in vehicles capable of interstellar flight, with all that implies about the advanced character of this other civilization; that the "UFO cover-up" thus conceals a great deal about the history of humanity, the technologies that may actually be available to us, and possibly much, much else; and that the time when those long-held, profound secrets will be secrets no longer may be close at hand, perhaps "changing everything" for the better. However, in spite of recent public hearings about the subject of government knowledge of these matters in the United States Congress, among other such developments, I cannot help but think of how the broader direction of government conduct seems to be headed in the extreme opposite direction of what would expect in an age of openness. The twenty-first century has seen the governments of even those states that Westerners identify most with liberal freedoms, government accountability, democracy conduct worldwide programs of rendition, torture and assassination--all as it seems the public, encouraged by the brass check takers of our news media, take the situation in stride. Indeed, governments are becoming secretive about matters that most would consider to be far more banal than extrajudicial killings, refusing to release data they formerly made public as a matter of course, and even removing previously published data from their sites. (That U.S. Department of Agriculture report on food insecurity I cited in a post on this very blog a while back? The government has officially announced that there won't be any update on that, the report gone.) And indeed, it seems that many an informed observer even the most narrow-minded centrist would hesitate to dismiss as an ufologist-style "conspiracy theorist" openly discusses what report the government does put out regarding such matters as prices, economic growth and employment with unprecedented suspicion, charging increasing manipulation of the numbers to brighten the dismal picture.
All of this, of course, has gone hand in hand with an era of open contempt on the part of elites in and out of government toward the public at large, whether one thinks of the increasingly unhinged character of their dismissal of working people as "takers" parasitic upon their supposed betters (now we hear that they are "scavengers," and even "unhumans"), or their indifference to the prospect of their mass death as already seen in a viral pandemic; or as they now contemplate in the event of environmental collapse, and even the nuclear war that, displaying a Barry Goldwater-like incomprehension of what such a conflict would mean.
Looking at all of that I imagine that if governments really are sitting on a mountain of world-changing information of this kind (about which proposition I must account myself skeptical), any "Age of Disclosure" remains far off, with the chatter we have heard so much serving other purposes, not least a distraction from more pressing matters that we all know to be only too real, with the choice of distraction itself significant. As Tom Engelhardt remarked in his very worthwhile book The End of Victory Culture, ufologists were "almost the only group . . . to take on the national security state directly" in the Cold War period, while in spite of that being case this was "the only oppositional group in those years that no one bothered to accuse of communism." That Authority treated the ufologists so lightly even amid the hysterical atmosphere of the Cold War as to not even bother Red-baiting them in that way to which they so reflexively and nastily resorted would seem far from testifying that they were ever onto anything--all as, where the public's perhaps inevitable skepticism of government truthfulness is concerned, there has been no safer outlet than this one. Accordingly one may reasonably see the interest here as a sublimation of other discontents, and at the same time, an interest that those desirous of deflecting public attention from the hard facts of polycrisis have every interest in cultivating.
All of this, of course, has gone hand in hand with an era of open contempt on the part of elites in and out of government toward the public at large, whether one thinks of the increasingly unhinged character of their dismissal of working people as "takers" parasitic upon their supposed betters (now we hear that they are "scavengers," and even "unhumans"), or their indifference to the prospect of their mass death as already seen in a viral pandemic; or as they now contemplate in the event of environmental collapse, and even the nuclear war that, displaying a Barry Goldwater-like incomprehension of what such a conflict would mean.
Looking at all of that I imagine that if governments really are sitting on a mountain of world-changing information of this kind (about which proposition I must account myself skeptical), any "Age of Disclosure" remains far off, with the chatter we have heard so much serving other purposes, not least a distraction from more pressing matters that we all know to be only too real, with the choice of distraction itself significant. As Tom Engelhardt remarked in his very worthwhile book The End of Victory Culture, ufologists were "almost the only group . . . to take on the national security state directly" in the Cold War period, while in spite of that being case this was "the only oppositional group in those years that no one bothered to accuse of communism." That Authority treated the ufologists so lightly even amid the hysterical atmosphere of the Cold War as to not even bother Red-baiting them in that way to which they so reflexively and nastily resorted would seem far from testifying that they were ever onto anything--all as, where the public's perhaps inevitable skepticism of government truthfulness is concerned, there has been no safer outlet than this one. Accordingly one may reasonably see the interest here as a sublimation of other discontents, and at the same time, an interest that those desirous of deflecting public attention from the hard facts of polycrisis have every interest in cultivating.
Book Review: The Road to Omaha, by Robert Ludlum
Robert Ludlum's MacKenzie Hawkins-Sam Devereaux novels seemed to me even more off the main track of his work than the novels Ludlum published as Jonathan Ryder. Those, at least, were thrillers (indeed, as it turned out, the Ryder novel Trevayne was one of his best such works), whereas his Sam Devereaux novels were comedies--all as I had found Ludlum's attempts at humor uneven. In truth I had sometimes enjoyed them (as with Valerie Converse's New York cab ride in The Aquitaine Progression or the misadventures of Brendan Prefontaine in The Bourne Ultimatum), but the weaker aspects of Ludlum's writing tended to put him at a particular disadvantage here. His tendency to make caricatures of his characters, ethnically as in other ways, went into overdrive here, with results that could seem crude and offensive rather than funny (like Krusty the Clown performing his '50s-era routine before a '90s audience), all as his less than efficient use of words seemed particularly disadvantageous when he went for laughs. Meanwhile this particular book, coming late in a period in which Ludlum was repeating himself (counting the return of Inver Brass in The Icarus Agenda this was his fourth sequel in a row), often to diminishing returns (certainly evident in the immediately preceding Bourne Ultimatum), could seem as if it had been on the shelf since the time when Ludlum wrote The Road to Gandolfo as he focused on his more profitable straight thrillers, and just brought this one out when he did out of sheer exhaustion before putting the pen down and letting the Ludlum name become the Ludlum "brand" slapped on the covers of the increasingly generic intelligence procedurals published under it from The Scorpio Illusion forward.
Still, suspecting this was the last "true" Ludlum novel I dove into The Road to Omaha--and all too predictably found it a slog. Rather than laughing at Sam Devereaux's predicament I found myself feeling sorry for him as I sympathized with his desire to just be left alone by the egomaniacal lunatic grifter General Mackenzie Hawkins (Ludlum's apparent admiration for whom jarred), all as the writing lived down to my lowest expectations. Indeed, during a rather protracted and complicated pursuit sequence through Boston that overtaxed my willingness to continue following the story I put down the book, unsure as to whether I would bother returning to it. But in the end I did so, and if it took me quite some time to "get into" the story (it didn't happen until I was almost halfway through this six hundred pager) I did get into it.
With the set-up out of the way, and Ludlum proceeding to develop the broader plot (this time Hawkins, with Devereaux once again dragged in, is suing the government "on behalf" of a Native American tribe Hawkins has determined may rightly own the land on which Strategic Air Command headquarters is built), he managed to put the scale and intricacy to which his narratives were prone to good effect, his taking in the bigger picture giving him plenty at which to direct his not merely comedic but satirical barbs, especially as we saw more of the villains of the piece and their machinations as they presumed to head off Hawkins' challenge to the government by other than strictly legal means. In the process Ludlum actually transforms General Hawkins from the (comic) villain he was the last time around, when he was simply after a big score, into an antihero fighting for justice (in his deranged way), all as Sam Devereaux goes from being Hawkins' hapless victim to this comedic epic's answer to Joel Converse, an accomplished attorney battling his Vietnam-era ghosts as he also battles the book's conspirators with the law as his weapon, with the book better off for it. Indeed, Ludlum gives free rein not just to the comedic impulses that did not always well-suit, for example, his Bourne sequels, but also to the politically critical impulses he made clear were still alive and well in his introduction to the reprint of his earlier Trevayne (impulses, if anything, exacerbated by the repellent state of American politics as Ludlum found it at the end of the 1980s) evident here to a degree not seen since the days when he was writing novels like Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript, giving the comedy its edge--with it helping greatly that displayed a healthy disrespect for the Establishment. Ludlum's depiction of Randolph Gates in The Bourne Ultimatum was just a hint of what he is to offer here, as Ludlum offered up some fairly inspired ideas, not least making the Director of Central Intelligence a literal "goodfella," selected for and installed in his position by the yacht club clichés who own the country's defense-industrial base (though they would never have such over to dinner, of course, such a personage "socially unacceptable," don't you know)--all as if you ever wondered what an "all star" government counter-terrorist team with John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier on it would be like (I didn't either), you find out here (sort of). Some of it even looks like prophesy in hindsight--like the combination of crudity and ignorance characterizing the dialogue in the book's Cabinet meeting, and its White House chief of staff who gives the press the middle finger as that press goes on being deferential in its wearisome pompous way.
The result was that what began as something of a chore became a pleasure as the pages flew by with results that were consistently amusing, and every once in a while even laugh out loud funny. By the end I was glad I had stuck with the book, which seemed a not unfitting close to the oeuvre of what I as much as ever think of as the "real Ludlum," the more in as where commercial fiction is concerned, what it had been possible to present as the material of a straight thriller in 1977 could only be presented as comedy in the political milieu of 1992, a less and less free and tolerant place where satire was concerned--all as, as we now know only too well, history's course was such course that in a very short time satire would be completely incapable of comparing with the stuff of our ever more em dash substitution-filled headlines for sheer absurdity and obscenity, exaggeration to any useful end simply impossible.
For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Still, suspecting this was the last "true" Ludlum novel I dove into The Road to Omaha--and all too predictably found it a slog. Rather than laughing at Sam Devereaux's predicament I found myself feeling sorry for him as I sympathized with his desire to just be left alone by the egomaniacal lunatic grifter General Mackenzie Hawkins (Ludlum's apparent admiration for whom jarred), all as the writing lived down to my lowest expectations. Indeed, during a rather protracted and complicated pursuit sequence through Boston that overtaxed my willingness to continue following the story I put down the book, unsure as to whether I would bother returning to it. But in the end I did so, and if it took me quite some time to "get into" the story (it didn't happen until I was almost halfway through this six hundred pager) I did get into it.
With the set-up out of the way, and Ludlum proceeding to develop the broader plot (this time Hawkins, with Devereaux once again dragged in, is suing the government "on behalf" of a Native American tribe Hawkins has determined may rightly own the land on which Strategic Air Command headquarters is built), he managed to put the scale and intricacy to which his narratives were prone to good effect, his taking in the bigger picture giving him plenty at which to direct his not merely comedic but satirical barbs, especially as we saw more of the villains of the piece and their machinations as they presumed to head off Hawkins' challenge to the government by other than strictly legal means. In the process Ludlum actually transforms General Hawkins from the (comic) villain he was the last time around, when he was simply after a big score, into an antihero fighting for justice (in his deranged way), all as Sam Devereaux goes from being Hawkins' hapless victim to this comedic epic's answer to Joel Converse, an accomplished attorney battling his Vietnam-era ghosts as he also battles the book's conspirators with the law as his weapon, with the book better off for it. Indeed, Ludlum gives free rein not just to the comedic impulses that did not always well-suit, for example, his Bourne sequels, but also to the politically critical impulses he made clear were still alive and well in his introduction to the reprint of his earlier Trevayne (impulses, if anything, exacerbated by the repellent state of American politics as Ludlum found it at the end of the 1980s) evident here to a degree not seen since the days when he was writing novels like Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript, giving the comedy its edge--with it helping greatly that displayed a healthy disrespect for the Establishment. Ludlum's depiction of Randolph Gates in The Bourne Ultimatum was just a hint of what he is to offer here, as Ludlum offered up some fairly inspired ideas, not least making the Director of Central Intelligence a literal "goodfella," selected for and installed in his position by the yacht club clichés who own the country's defense-industrial base (though they would never have such over to dinner, of course, such a personage "socially unacceptable," don't you know)--all as if you ever wondered what an "all star" government counter-terrorist team with John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier on it would be like (I didn't either), you find out here (sort of). Some of it even looks like prophesy in hindsight--like the combination of crudity and ignorance characterizing the dialogue in the book's Cabinet meeting, and its White House chief of staff who gives the press the middle finger as that press goes on being deferential in its wearisome pompous way.
The result was that what began as something of a chore became a pleasure as the pages flew by with results that were consistently amusing, and every once in a while even laugh out loud funny. By the end I was glad I had stuck with the book, which seemed a not unfitting close to the oeuvre of what I as much as ever think of as the "real Ludlum," the more in as where commercial fiction is concerned, what it had been possible to present as the material of a straight thriller in 1977 could only be presented as comedy in the political milieu of 1992, a less and less free and tolerant place where satire was concerned--all as, as we now know only too well, history's course was such course that in a very short time satire would be completely incapable of comparing with the stuff of our ever more em dash substitution-filled headlines for sheer absurdity and obscenity, exaggeration to any useful end simply impossible.
For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.
Of Mack Bolan and Leroy Jethro Gibbs: Thoughts
Of course in other respects the situations are different. There is what exactly they had in the way of family. The young Bolan who went off to war had yet to settle down and marry, with the result that his family consisted of his parents and siblings, whereas Gibbs was a married man with a wife and daughter. The circumstances of the destruction of their families were also different, Bolan's father Sam, trying to make ends meet in the wake of a heart attack forcing him to shift from his old job to a less demanding but lower-paying one at the steel plant, took out a loan that seemed safe enough at first but proved to be predatory. Repayment being beyond his means he unsurprisingly failed to pay up, leading to the loan officers having the affiliated Mafia henchmen beat him up to make him somehow come up with the cash he didn't have. This drove his daughter Cindy to go and plead with them to lay off--something they agreed to do if she entered their employ as a prostitute to "work off" her father's debt, an offer she accepted. As it happened, her younger brother Johnny found out about what she was doing and told dad, who, apparently driven to madness by the news, shot the women, then Johnny, and then himself. By contrast it seems that Gibbs' wife simply happened to witness a crime, and the killer she was in a position to testify against decide to keep her from ever being able to testify. And of course, there was what the heroes did afterward. The vengeance Bolan exacts on the Mafia in Pittsfield--a whole series of actions that leave a very large number of gangsters dead and no doubt about the party responsible in the view of either the Mafia or the authorities--places him squarely outside society, while being just the beginning of the "War Against the Mafia" that is the book's title, and the theme of the series through the decade. For Gibbs the revenge killing is a one-shot incident he buried in his past as, after departing the Marines, he joined the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and rose through the ranks to become the senior functionary he is by the time of the TV series--though of course, like just about every popular hero of the type, he is not unknown to act the "loose cannon" and so look less Bolan-like in the process.
Still, having described the two characters' arcs it should be clear that any attempt to adapt Bolan's story would easily see the creator end up with something that looks a lot more like Gibbs'. After all, if Bolan's creator Don Pendleton in 1969 could expect that his readers would see the elder Bolan's destruction of his family as ultimately the fault of the Mafia's preying on them this is less the case today. His taking a gun and shooting his children, his wife and himself is what we today call a "mass shooting"--discussing which it is today all but taboo to seek explanation, those who violate it being vulnerable to accusation of excusing it (a stance that is not only unfair but, self-servingly from the standpoint of those who prefer such things not be discussed, putting consideration of social and economic factors, and criticism of what they mean for human life, beyond the pale). And of course the complex of prejudices regarding gender, religion, race further problematizes the matter, given the news that prompted the elder Bolan's action. Certainly were Bolan not an Irish-American but of a certain other background the conventional response would be to call his act of violence, particularly in regard to his daughter, an "honor killing"--remembering which facts is an unwelcome reminder to many that traditionalist notions of female and family honor in America are not so different from those of peoples that mainstream Americans prefer to treat as an utterly alien Other whose barbaric behavior toward their womenfolk is absolutely unlike anything ever seen in the West.
Meanwhile, even if oblivious to the ethno-religious double standard prevailing in such matters (as a great many persons who think of themselves as "progressive" are) the "woke" would at least speak of Bolan's father's "toxic masculinity" in dealing with his failure to provide for and protect his loved ones in the way that he did (while those with a broader, richer, social perspective will think about what Sam Bolan's hard luck says about working class life in America). Altogether, if no reasonable person would deny the destructive role of the Mafia in the episode, many would blame the elder Bolan and his backward values for his ultimately having killed himself, his wife, his daughter, with this, in turn, coloring their judgment of Mack Bolan. After all, not only does his course raise the eternal controversy over the legitimacy of vigilante action, but the view of Bolan's actions as a matter of Mack, refusing to accept his father's inability to confront either his personal mistakes or the bigger social reality behind them as ultimately the culprits, laying the entire blame on ethnic gangsters as he goes on a racist vigilante killing spree--and indeed, between this and Bolan's own recognition of the impossibility of his task (one vigilante wiping out the whole Mafia?), many would see him as the product of a sick, bigoted, culture simply having lost his mind. The result is that even if Bellisario had actually consciously thought through an adaptation of Mack Bolan's story as the basis of Gibbs' back story, his keeping that particular sequence of events in his own narrative was totally out of the question, and electing instead for the plain and simple murder of Gibbs' wife and daughter by the thug against whom he exacted his personal revenge was probably the only way that he could have gone if he was serious about getting a show on the air in 2003.
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