Deadline has (finally) presented the results of its Most Valuable Blockbusters tournament.
Reviewing the list of champions I was unsurprised to see Dune make the top ten (#7), Wicked the top five (#5), Despicable Me rank higher than Wicked (#4), Deadpool rank higher than that (#3), Moana higher still (#2) and Inside Out 2 land the top spot (#1). I was also unsurprised to see It Ends with Us place (#6), or toand see Kung Fu Panda make the cut (#8). And while I didn't mention them in the post that I wrote before the holidays (even if it only got up in early January) after seeing their grosses I wasn't surprised to see late holiday releases Mufasa or Sonic 3 round out the group (ranking at #9 and #10 respectively).
Of course, that leaves the matters of the smaller movies that turned relatively large profits, and of the year's biggest failures. I had no expectations about the "small movies, big profits" category, except that if It Ends with Us failed to make the top ten list it would end up here--and, I suppose, that horror movies would be a strong presence. That didn't happen, of course, leaving us with a list made up entirely of the year's higher-profile horror movies (A Quiet Place and Nosferatu followed by Smile 2, Speak No Evil and Longlegs). By contrast I did have expectations about the biggest flops, and I was, again, unsurprised that Joker 2 got the #1 spot, and that Furiosa, Megalopolis and Borderlands accounted for the next three places. (I had thought that Megalopolis would get the #2 spot, rather than #4, but it seems Lionsgate did well in the pre-Cannes screening foreign deals, such that the foreign distributors suffered much more from paying $50 million for rights to a movie that grossed just $7 million--a reminder that estimates are only that in the absence of knowledge of the details of the dealmaking.) I didn't have anything to say about Kraven the Hunter, but it's goetting the number five spot (for Sony's Spider-Man Universe movie it might be it still had a $110 million production budget, with a marketing budget to match) was, again, no shocker.
That said, I do not think the "smaller hits" or "biggest flops" lists tell us very much about the state of the market these days. That we had five horror movies on the "smaller hits" list is pretty consistent with past experience, and only affirms the old truism that horror remains by far the most consistently successful way to turn a relatively large profit on a small movie. The list of flops similarly affirms old truisms. Joker 2's colossal ($144 million in the red) failure merely demonstrates that if a successful filmmaker is intent on making his the sequel to a major hit of his a flop that will ruin any legacy he may have achieved with its predecessor, is empowered to act in such a fashion, and makes the fullest use of that opportunity by displaying utter, hate-filled, contempt for his fans, he has a fair chance of succeeding. Meanwhile Furiosa's flopping underlines the extent to which Mad Max: Fury Road was a money-losing flop rather than the success the financial illiterates of the press made it out to be back in 2015, and the hazards of making big-budget releases about side characters, the audience's limited appetite for prequels generally, and the dubious prospects of a film reliant on a connection with a release from a decade earlier. Megalopolis was another example of how "directorial vision" can miscarry at the box office, while Borderlands and Kraven the Hunter each seem footnotes in the stories of the video game adaptation and the superhero film, respectively. If Borderlands flopped very badly that was a matter of a much-delayed, bad buzz-burdened, poorly reviewed dump month release hitting theaters when a mega-hit was carrying everything before it, and far less significant than the many successes the genre has been piling up recently (most recently, Minecraft); while the December release of Kraven the Hunter only proved again the difficulty of selling superhero films centered on relatively minor characters, especially when they come from outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with delay, bad buzz, poor reviews and a crowded market working against them.
Still, I think that if examination of the "smaller movies with big profits" and the flops is not very illuminating with respect to the larger picture of the post-pandemic film business the biggest hits do tell us something about the market, especially if we look past the surface. At first glance the movies may seem to affirm the salience of the established blockbuster mode, and with it the skepticism about Hollywood needing to change the way it does things of the kind that 2023 seemed to suggest. After all, not one of the movies was an original film based on an original screenplay, with, excluding the Dune movie (treatable as the second half of a larger story) seven of them actually sequels or prequels (with two of them a "Part 3" and two more of them a "Part 4"). Of those ten films nine (all but It Ends With Us) were science fiction or fantasy spectacles of some type. Five of those nine (counting Mufasa), and one might add the top two (the Inside Out and Moana sequels), were family-oriented animated spectacles, and the live-action movies a retread of a classic space opera, a Marvel superhero film, a stage-to-screen adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, and a video game-based adventure (with a computer-generated protagonist, even if the film is otherwise live-action). The list even seems an affirmation of Disney's dominance of this kind of filmmaking, with the company's movies having a highly disproportionate four of the top ten spots, including the top three (in the Inside Out, Moana and Deadpool sequels).
However, the actual financial data quickly complicates that view. Certainly I was struck by how the figures indicated lower spending on the big animated hits than I thought it they would. Illumination's reputation for efficiency (and the published price tags for the preceding Despicable Me franchise films) may not make the $100 million Despicable Me 4 was made for surprising, but this was still important to the bottom line, while it is worth remarking that Kung Fu Panda was made for half what its predecessors cost, and that if Mufasa was pricey ($200 million) it was still rather cheaper in inflation-adjusted, real, terms than 2019's The Lion King--all of which was even more important to their achieving these their profit margins, given their relatively low grosses compared with those predecessors.* I had a similar impression looking at Deadpool & Wolverine. Granted, that franchise began with a relatively low-budgeted film (as Deadpool's own endless breaking of the fourth wall constantly reminded us), but especially when we consider the charge bill for Marvel's movies in the past, the inflation of recent years, the cost of getting Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman together (a key selling point for the movie), and the film's being a threequel to a series launched by another studio, $200 million is far from extravagant, all as the final bill for "participations" ended up lower than I would have guessed between the series' history, the stars and the final colossal gross. (As the movie approached a Top Gun 2-like gross I had thought the numbers here could be Top Gun 2-like as well. It didn't play out that way in the end.) And so on and so forth, the kind of bank-breakers to which we were previously accustomed just not a presence, as the totals show. After all, gGoing by Deadline's figures, in 2019 the production bill for the ten most profitable films was at least $2 billion (perhaps much more, going by what has been reported about the full bill for the highest-grosser, Avengers: Endgame), which in 2024 dollars would work out to $2.4 billion+. By contrast the top ten films of 2024 cost perhaps $1.4 billion.. Meanwhile the total outlay (counting in distribution, promotion, etc.) was $5.3 billion for the top ten films in 2019, and $6.4 billion when we adjust the figure for 2024 dollars, while the comparable figure for the top ten films of 2024 was a comparatively modest $4.1 billion.
In considering these totals it is only fair to point out that 2024, and particularly the first half of 2024, saw fewer big movies come out than usual due to the delays caused by the Hollywood strike of the prior year (with this only partially compensated by the extent to which big movies slated for release in late 2023, like Dune, Part Two, were bumped over into 2024). Still, the fact that they were such typical blockbusters in franchises that had previously generated top ten-caliber hits, and that so many of them were franchise films with smaller budgets than their predecessors, works against any argument that this was simply a matter of the bar for such success having been lowered. Rather it suggestsif the release slate was thinner than with the fact remains that, as shown before, nine of the top ten were the kinds of movies we expect to be such blockbusters, while when we compare the budgets on those big movies to the cost of not just comparable earlier movies but often immediate predecessors in the same franchise (most obviously in the case of Kung Fu Panda, though as other cases show the trend is more broadly evident) it seems that Hollywood is responding to a tougher market by putting out the same old product, but endeavoring to make it more cheaply so as to lower the threshold for profitability. That
In other words, rather than rising to the challenge by trying to make movies people really want to see, they are staying the course, but pinching their pennies--and to go by some of the comment, cutting corners.
Still, in spite of the studios' predictable resistance to change the top ten do show us that even if they are shoveling the same . . . stuff . . . out to the moviegoer, the moviegoer is not necessarily acting in accordance with their plans, really needing to be excited to get to the theater. In their own ways those two seemingly very different films, Deadpool & Wolverine, and It Ends With Us, offer handy demonstration of this. If some would like to think Deadpool & Wolverine was a "four-quadrant" movie the truth was that it was a case of a movie with a very strong appeal to a particular slice of the audience which flocked to the theaters for a record opening weekend and kept business hopping for weeks afterward, not least because the makers of the film made such a point of giving that target audience what they wanted (to the point of caring more about that than making a movie that was "good" in the conventional sense in the view of some)--while the backers of It Ends With Us similarly aimed for a particular portion of the audience that was very interested in the movie rather than trying to bring in "everyone," and relative to their smaller investment did even better. (Deadpool saw a half billion dollars spent to make a profit of $400 million--whereas It Ends With Us saw a $150 million spent to net $200 million, a return of 130 percent as against the 80 percent on Deadpool.)
Again, as I have been arguing since seeing the data from 2023: rather than looking for returns by putting up the proverbial tentpole and expecting everyone to show up, the studios would do better to make movies for a smaller but really interested share of the audience. As the case of Deadpool shows this does not have to mean original fare, or low budgets, or low (absolute) grosses--but Deadpool would seem a comparative rarity, the more successful efforts more likely to look like an It Ends With Us than a Deadpool. And at this stage of things, with 2025 so far looking much more like 2023 than it does 2024, my guess is that this year, producing a bigger harvest of big-budget flops, will only provide more evidence for that argument--while my guess is also that those who call the shots in Tinseltown will continue to completely ignore that viewargument as they continue to barrage us with sequels and prequels and reboots and remakes no one ever asked for, with the sole difference from what they were doing before their making them in a cut-rate fashion.
* Kung Fu Panda 4 cost $85 million, as against the $185-$195 million the prior three films cost when adjusted for 2024 prices; while Mufasa's $200 million is a lot less than the $260 million, or $320 million in December 2024 terms, spent on The Lion King.
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Yes, 2025 is Looking Like 2023 at the Box Office
Last year, as Hollywood's courtiers in the entertainment press gushed over the successes of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool 3 as proof that Hollywood's way of making and marketing movies, called into question by the succession of seemingly sure-fire tentpoles (The Flash, Indiana Jones 5, Captain Marvel 2, etc., etc.) that flopped spectacularly through 2023, had been proven ultimately sound and that that year could be dismissed as if it were no more than a bad dream, it seemed to me that 2024 was the anomaly, a result of there not being so many flopping tentpoles because there were far fewer tentpoles than usual for audiences to reject, whereas 2025 with its crowded release slate would probably end up playing like 2023 that way. And indeed, 2025 has already seen a big, supposedly new-era-of-the-Marvel-Cinematic-Universe Valentine's Day release and a live-action adaptation of a much-loved Disney animated classic both underperform badly--with the Marvel movie supposed to kick off the summer opening less well than hoped. The repetition of the pattern of 2023 is even evident in the year's principal success--an April release based on a hit video game franchise which has not impressed the critics but which definitely excited fans overperforming sensationally. (The folks at Boxoffice Pro projected $55-$75 million opening in its first forecast, through the next three weeks predicted
something only marginally higher in the $60-$80 million range and then on the Wednesday before opening weekend only a bit higher than that--$85-$100 million. The movie ended up pulling $163 million in its first three days in North American release--while displaying some staying power its domestic total as of its third weekend was a very respectable $345 million.)
Of course, we are at the time of this writing still less than a third of the way into the year. However, for the time being I see no reason to expect any divergence from the pattern just yet--however much those who have a stake in Hollywood being able to turn a profit delivering the same thing over and over and over again for many more years and therefore sneer at all the painful lessons of 2023 would like to believe otherwise as they cleave to anything that may indicate Tinseltown need only "stay the course" rather than actually make an effort to keep its audience.
Of course, we are at the time of this writing still less than a third of the way into the year. However, for the time being I see no reason to expect any divergence from the pattern just yet--however much those who have a stake in Hollywood being able to turn a profit delivering the same thing over and over and over again for many more years and therefore sneer at all the painful lessons of 2023 would like to believe otherwise as they cleave to anything that may indicate Tinseltown need only "stay the course" rather than actually make an effort to keep its audience.
Revisiting '90s SFTV
In North America the '90s saw a boom in first-run syndicated drama, new broadcast networks, and the burgeoning of made-for-cable programming--all of which were more daring with regard to genre material than the Big Three networks--resulting in a then-unprecedented volume of production of original live-action science fiction and fantasy television. This was not only the case with the number of shows produced at once. It was also the case with the readiness to keep them in production from season to season--certainly as compared with the notorious haste of the networks to cancel the few ventures they made in this area--which permitted a fair number of shows to give us something we really hadn't seen before. (If television had done "story arcs" before, none gave us the kind of tightly constructed multi-season narrative that Babylon 5 did, for example, while in the decades later that fact still stands out given how "story arcs" since then have mostly amounted to head games and soap opera and insufferable postmodernist flippancy toward the audience on the way to the underwhelming finales audiences now ritualistically lament after the last episode.) And in the process a fair number of these shows managed to make some impression on pop culture, broadly speaking (such that it was not just the sci-fi TV addict who knew who Jean-Luc Picard, Mulder and Scully, Buffy, Xena, all were).
All of this has made many see the '90s as a "golden age" for the form, an opinion I have certainly held in the past, and still hold now. Still, revisiting the subject today I find myself thinking about what I didn't write about then--or even see as meriting much discussion when summing up the period. Those years saw a great boom in space opera (Star Trek, Stargate, the aforementioned Babylon 5, etc.), fantasy of the contemporary urban (Highlander, the Buffyverse) and historical (the Hercules/Xenaverse) types, and of course, paranormal investigation (The X-Files). But in the '90s, the decade of the Internet, when cyberpunk's splash was still making ripples through pop culture (after cyberpunk we had "post-cyberpunk"), where was that genre in all this? One might also wonder where the superheroes were in that as well--certainly in the sense of secret identity-having, code-named, costumed personages.
In fairness there was a fair number of shows in both those genres. For cyberpunk we had TekWar, Robocop, Total Recall 2070, and of course, Dark Angel. And where superheroes were concerned we had M.A.N.T.I.S., and Malibu Comics' Nightman, and even Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Still, none of these shows was very long-lived, or made much of a splash by comparison with the bigger hits of the era. Cyberpunk on the small screen proved as tough a sell as it was on the big (apart from the at best partial exception of The Matrix, just how many of those '90s computer-themed films really got much of an audience?), while there was still less success for superheroes here than at the cineplex (when, even if the '90s was a far cry from the 21st century, we still had, besides the obvious case of Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Men in Black and assorted lesser successes).
One can argue over the strengths and failings of particular shows, and whether or not these shows deserved to find a bigger audience than they did, but all the same this was where the lot ended up, without the compensation of very much of a cult audience so far as I can tell. (Dark Angel certainly has its following--but the show itself seems to have been all but buried, with all that means for its impact.) The result is that it actually seems to me that these genres actually fared better in animation. I think a case can actually be made for Phantom 2040 as the most striking piece of cyberpunk North American television produced in these years--and a noteworthy superhero show as well--in these same years which also gave us Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, Batman: The Animated Series, HBO's well-received Spawn, and the FOX X-Men (whose lasting impression is confirmed by the new X-Men '97 follow-up series), as well as parodies like The Tick. One might see that as a matter of these themes simply lending themselves better to half-hour animated fare than hour-long live-action shows given producer expectations and the technical state of the art at the time, but one can also see it as a matter of the creators, in a period in which American animation displayed more than the usual ambition, the creators and showrunners and their staffs, in spite of such constraints as (in most of these cases) having to produce their shows for a younger audience with all the censorship that entailed, simply managed to outdo their better-positioned counterparts--with the result that the principal '90s screen legacy of these genres is to be found there.
All of this has made many see the '90s as a "golden age" for the form, an opinion I have certainly held in the past, and still hold now. Still, revisiting the subject today I find myself thinking about what I didn't write about then--or even see as meriting much discussion when summing up the period. Those years saw a great boom in space opera (Star Trek, Stargate, the aforementioned Babylon 5, etc.), fantasy of the contemporary urban (Highlander, the Buffyverse) and historical (the Hercules/Xenaverse) types, and of course, paranormal investigation (The X-Files). But in the '90s, the decade of the Internet, when cyberpunk's splash was still making ripples through pop culture (after cyberpunk we had "post-cyberpunk"), where was that genre in all this? One might also wonder where the superheroes were in that as well--certainly in the sense of secret identity-having, code-named, costumed personages.
In fairness there was a fair number of shows in both those genres. For cyberpunk we had TekWar, Robocop, Total Recall 2070, and of course, Dark Angel. And where superheroes were concerned we had M.A.N.T.I.S., and Malibu Comics' Nightman, and even Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Still, none of these shows was very long-lived, or made much of a splash by comparison with the bigger hits of the era. Cyberpunk on the small screen proved as tough a sell as it was on the big (apart from the at best partial exception of The Matrix, just how many of those '90s computer-themed films really got much of an audience?), while there was still less success for superheroes here than at the cineplex (when, even if the '90s was a far cry from the 21st century, we still had, besides the obvious case of Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Men in Black and assorted lesser successes).
One can argue over the strengths and failings of particular shows, and whether or not these shows deserved to find a bigger audience than they did, but all the same this was where the lot ended up, without the compensation of very much of a cult audience so far as I can tell. (Dark Angel certainly has its following--but the show itself seems to have been all but buried, with all that means for its impact.) The result is that it actually seems to me that these genres actually fared better in animation. I think a case can actually be made for Phantom 2040 as the most striking piece of cyberpunk North American television produced in these years--and a noteworthy superhero show as well--in these same years which also gave us Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, Batman: The Animated Series, HBO's well-received Spawn, and the FOX X-Men (whose lasting impression is confirmed by the new X-Men '97 follow-up series), as well as parodies like The Tick. One might see that as a matter of these themes simply lending themselves better to half-hour animated fare than hour-long live-action shows given producer expectations and the technical state of the art at the time, but one can also see it as a matter of the creators, in a period in which American animation displayed more than the usual ambition, the creators and showrunners and their staffs, in spite of such constraints as (in most of these cases) having to produce their shows for a younger audience with all the censorship that entailed, simply managed to outdo their better-positioned counterparts--with the result that the principal '90s screen legacy of these genres is to be found there.
Notes on the "Dad" Thriller
In recent years the term "dad thriller," and related terms like "dad action movie," seem to have come into vogue.
What do they really mean?
Simply put, they are thrillers that are supposed to be appealing to "dads"--stereotypically middle-aged and "middle-class" family men--because they have protagonists who are middle-aged, "middle-class," family men to whom they can easily relate, and premises with a special resonance for men of their social background, time of life, generation, as with the common "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenarios, which enable relatability because for all the implausibility unavoidable in the form they are fairly grounded compared to other kinds of action movie.
In the piece where he seems to have coined the term (and given us a fair bit of theorizing about the concept in the bargain) Max Reed references Harrison Ford a lot. (Indeed, Reed offers a handy list of questions for those wondering "Am I watching a Dad Thriller Right Now?" that begins with "Is Harrison Ford in the movie?) And it seems to me that Reed is right to do so--with, I think, Ford's 1992 Jack Ryan film Patriot Games a good example, precisely because of when and where Jack Ryan was in his life in that movie (and the novel that was its source material). Most hear the name "Jack Ryan" and think "CIA" and therefore "action hero," but Ryan was an analyst who moved very high up the administrative ranks very fast, not a field man (that's John Clark's territory), while that story was a prequel to The Hunt for Red October in which in spite of his past, brief, work for the Agency (again, in an analytical capacity) Ryan was still an historian teaching at Annapolis who found himself physically intervening in an assassination attempt and then as a result stuck in an "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenario.
In discussing such films Reed acknowledges that they were far more prominent at the box office in that period, the '90s--as one sees when comparing Patriot Games, which was made, marketed and released as one of the summer of '92's big action movies, and still more such movies as Ford's The Fugitive (1993) and Air Force One (1997), as against how the not dissimilar Firewall did, the former movies among their year's big hits, but Firewall (2006) coming and going scarcely noticed at the box office. Indeed, like many other stars Ford saw his career suffer along with the decline of the genre with which he was associated--the dad thrillers that were the post-Han Solo, post-Indiana Jones basis of his box office success broadly declining, with such movies no basis for what career recovery he has had since, these today "January release" material, when not simply made-for-streaming, and that often as a series rather than a two-hour film. Thus did it in fact go with the Jack Ryan franchise to which Patriot Games belonged--its last made-for-and-actually-released-in theaters feature, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit dumped in theaters in January 2015, with results that a decade on have not prompted another such Ryan movie, the more in as the figure seems to have found his new home on streaming in an Amazon TV series.
What happened to them? The answer is that the action movie changed. The genre became a lot more science fiction-al, not incidentally as it relied on bigger and flashier spectacle to keep audiences coming to theaters, with superheroes in particular taking over, as the genre got to be a lot more "young adult," both of which tendencies the consistent success of the Spider-Man franchise through the twenty-first century exemplifies (and in their way, so too such hits as the Fast and Furious franchise). The old dad thrillers couldn't compete with that for box office dollars, not least because these other options were more enticing to younger moviegoers--rather less likely to see them than prior cohorts at the same age. After all, back in the '90s the "dad thrillers" the big thrillers were dad thrillers, and the young action fan took them in stride, with one ironic result the appeal of the dad thriller now lying partly in nostalgia, today's "dads" having seen them long before they were dads, grown up on them and ended up nostalgic for them, as their children grow up on Marvel.
What do they really mean?
Simply put, they are thrillers that are supposed to be appealing to "dads"--stereotypically middle-aged and "middle-class" family men--because they have protagonists who are middle-aged, "middle-class," family men to whom they can easily relate, and premises with a special resonance for men of their social background, time of life, generation, as with the common "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenarios, which enable relatability because for all the implausibility unavoidable in the form they are fairly grounded compared to other kinds of action movie.
In the piece where he seems to have coined the term (and given us a fair bit of theorizing about the concept in the bargain) Max Reed references Harrison Ford a lot. (Indeed, Reed offers a handy list of questions for those wondering "Am I watching a Dad Thriller Right Now?" that begins with "Is Harrison Ford in the movie?) And it seems to me that Reed is right to do so--with, I think, Ford's 1992 Jack Ryan film Patriot Games a good example, precisely because of when and where Jack Ryan was in his life in that movie (and the novel that was its source material). Most hear the name "Jack Ryan" and think "CIA" and therefore "action hero," but Ryan was an analyst who moved very high up the administrative ranks very fast, not a field man (that's John Clark's territory), while that story was a prequel to The Hunt for Red October in which in spite of his past, brief, work for the Agency (again, in an analytical capacity) Ryan was still an historian teaching at Annapolis who found himself physically intervening in an assassination attempt and then as a result stuck in an "At this moment in my life I am not a natural action hero but I have to become one to protect my family from nasty foreigners" scenario.
In discussing such films Reed acknowledges that they were far more prominent at the box office in that period, the '90s--as one sees when comparing Patriot Games, which was made, marketed and released as one of the summer of '92's big action movies, and still more such movies as Ford's The Fugitive (1993) and Air Force One (1997), as against how the not dissimilar Firewall did, the former movies among their year's big hits, but Firewall (2006) coming and going scarcely noticed at the box office. Indeed, like many other stars Ford saw his career suffer along with the decline of the genre with which he was associated--the dad thrillers that were the post-Han Solo, post-Indiana Jones basis of his box office success broadly declining, with such movies no basis for what career recovery he has had since, these today "January release" material, when not simply made-for-streaming, and that often as a series rather than a two-hour film. Thus did it in fact go with the Jack Ryan franchise to which Patriot Games belonged--its last made-for-and-actually-released-in theaters feature, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit dumped in theaters in January 2015, with results that a decade on have not prompted another such Ryan movie, the more in as the figure seems to have found his new home on streaming in an Amazon TV series.
What happened to them? The answer is that the action movie changed. The genre became a lot more science fiction-al, not incidentally as it relied on bigger and flashier spectacle to keep audiences coming to theaters, with superheroes in particular taking over, as the genre got to be a lot more "young adult," both of which tendencies the consistent success of the Spider-Man franchise through the twenty-first century exemplifies (and in their way, so too such hits as the Fast and Furious franchise). The old dad thrillers couldn't compete with that for box office dollars, not least because these other options were more enticing to younger moviegoers--rather less likely to see them than prior cohorts at the same age. After all, back in the '90s the "dad thrillers" the big thrillers were dad thrillers, and the young action fan took them in stride, with one ironic result the appeal of the dad thriller now lying partly in nostalgia, today's "dads" having seen them long before they were dads, grown up on them and ended up nostalgic for them, as their children grow up on Marvel.
The Independent Blogger's Fate: An Economic Perspective
There is a pattern in modern economic life which is well-established in the historical record. Specifically a new sector emerges, which is initially a comparatively open field, into which many contenders enter--but fierce, and never remotely equal, with economies of scale paying off, competition thins out the field fast. Many get driven out of business altogether, some get swallowed up entirely by bigger operations on some terms or other, others continue to operate as apparent brand names in their own right but as a practical matter dependents of those bigger and more successful operators, as the scene turns into an oligopoly, if not a monopoly. Those big players strongly established, with the expansion of the winners and the increasing sophistication of the game having raised the amount of capital anyone needs to make a plausible entry into the field to immense proportions and the venture exceedingly risky, few are ready to try and fewer still of those who do so get anywhere, with the result that the rhetoric of "entrepreneurship" and "small business" and "startup" rings very hollow to anyone with an eye to facts rather than the pieties of orthodoxy--and indeed those who hope to build a small business into a big one prone to try their luck elsewhere, as the giants of the field find themselves in so secure a position that John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of them as, unlike their small business counterparts, having moved out of the "market system" into a "planning system."
So did it go in such areas as automobiles, where there were over two thousand producers before the ascent to dominance of the "Big Three" (since which time the field has consolidated even more thoroughly), and aerospace, where the fewness of the high-end producers today is underscored every time a big defense contract is to be handed out (a whole two choices!). So has it gone in the computing field, where before Microsoft, Google, Facebook we had rather a larger number of contenders in the areas of operating system, search engine, social media platform. If less obviously, so is it also going with the creation of online content, at least to the extent that such content is expected to have any traction in the "attention economy." Independent bloggers may go on writing, but they get read less and less as the market is instead more and more dominated by big platforms--and launching your own blog today on your own, unsupported, in the hope that it will one day grow big, makes about as much sense as trying to launch your own operating system or social media platform in today's market.
This is most certainly not the web promised by the cyber-utopians. But it is most certainly the web that those familiar with economic history ought to have expected, the one we all too predictably got, and the one with which we are constrained to cope, for better or worse.
So did it go in such areas as automobiles, where there were over two thousand producers before the ascent to dominance of the "Big Three" (since which time the field has consolidated even more thoroughly), and aerospace, where the fewness of the high-end producers today is underscored every time a big defense contract is to be handed out (a whole two choices!). So has it gone in the computing field, where before Microsoft, Google, Facebook we had rather a larger number of contenders in the areas of operating system, search engine, social media platform. If less obviously, so is it also going with the creation of online content, at least to the extent that such content is expected to have any traction in the "attention economy." Independent bloggers may go on writing, but they get read less and less as the market is instead more and more dominated by big platforms--and launching your own blog today on your own, unsupported, in the hope that it will one day grow big, makes about as much sense as trying to launch your own operating system or social media platform in today's market.
This is most certainly not the web promised by the cyber-utopians. But it is most certainly the web that those familiar with economic history ought to have expected, the one we all too predictably got, and the one with which we are constrained to cope, for better or worse.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Blogger in 2025
The idea that someone is going to set up a blog online and amass a meaningful audience--enough for them to be thought of as a public figure in some degree, perhaps enough to make a living blogging, maybe even become rich and famous doing this, realizing that dream of celebrity that is for many the sole hope of escape from being a penniless Nobody in America--was always a longshot, an extreme longshot (as with pretty much all of the aspiration commended to everyone in this culture). From the start the ratio of bloggers to audience was so high as to invite unfavorable comparison with buying a lottery ticket (less work, bigger prize than even the winners at this other game are likely to see), while even if the idea of competition did not lose all meaning amid the overwhelming crowdedness of the field, the Internet was the furthest thing from a "level playing field" that could be imagined.
But the terms of the "game" only got worse, much worse, over time, as winners leaped ahead of a field that just went on getting more crowded with all this meant in the pursuit of eyeballs--as the Internet we knew mutated into something else. What we call "search" was increasingly subject to manipulation by ad dollar-chasers and search engine manipulators, making it harder for the Internet user to find anything they actually wanted. Paywalls proliferated, obstructing movement for those who still had any inclination to search the web themselves. Social media accounts lured people away from old-fashioned Internet surfing to just logging into their accounts to passively stare at their feeds. And of course, it has to be acknowledged that in the process Internet culture, and culture as a whole, was shifting away from long-form writing to Tweet-length written communication, and indeed from the written to the audiovisual as the "vlogger" replaced the "blogger."
As if all that were not enough the Internet's gatekeepers (search engines, social media platforms, syndicators of written content, etc.) went to war against "fake news" and "misinformation" and "extremism," which campaign was really cover for (besides an assault on those whose opinions are really offensive to Silicon Valley) a war against Internet small fry --because the endless fake news put out by the big media outlets, and of course by those who paid them for advertising, was just fine by them (all as even the most perniciously fake news-flogging small-timers got a pass if they did made the companies money by hooking users so they were subject to more ads), after which so-called "helpful" updates dealt those not on their good side one blow after another.
At that point many a blogger looking at their current level of traffic and comparing it to what they had even a short time earlier may have felt themselves in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but as is so often the way with the survivors holding on in such a hellscape in tales of that sort yet another threat emerged to threaten the survivors with final extermination. Those chatbots over which Silicon Valley's courtiers in the media gushed so stupidly, in the course of replacing increasingly broken old-fashioned search by taking questions and giving answers, were spared their users the trouble of actually going to sites for information. (A Perplexity, for example, gives its sources, but I suspect few bother with them any more than they do the endnotes when they read a book, if they ever do.) The result is that much less actual human visitation for the sites the chatbots consult, with TollBit telling us that this last has meant a 96 percent collapse in traffic to publishers compared with search engines, just one visit for every twenty-five they would have got before, with every sign that this tendency will only increase, and fast, in the months and years to come.
In short, since at least the early twenty-first century pretty much every new development seems to have gone against the independent blogger, rather than for them--against their chances of "discovery" by, let alone "engagement" with members of a potential audience--with, I think, besides the fact of AI giving the public its answers sans any need for conventional research efforts of their own, the fact that AI may increasingly be the generator of content online, the merely human writer forced to compete with ever-growing armies of chatbots pouring forth words on command, perhaps not brilliantly, but certainly with a speed and tirelessness and versatility no human with their own interests and passions can match, making talk of "competition" an absurdity.
In spite of it all I suspect many who have stuck it out this long will refuse to wholly give up. But it is certainly making their blogging for an audience of none likely to just go on shrinking from even that level an ever more thankless task, as many others decide that it is time to walk away.
But the terms of the "game" only got worse, much worse, over time, as winners leaped ahead of a field that just went on getting more crowded with all this meant in the pursuit of eyeballs--as the Internet we knew mutated into something else. What we call "search" was increasingly subject to manipulation by ad dollar-chasers and search engine manipulators, making it harder for the Internet user to find anything they actually wanted. Paywalls proliferated, obstructing movement for those who still had any inclination to search the web themselves. Social media accounts lured people away from old-fashioned Internet surfing to just logging into their accounts to passively stare at their feeds. And of course, it has to be acknowledged that in the process Internet culture, and culture as a whole, was shifting away from long-form writing to Tweet-length written communication, and indeed from the written to the audiovisual as the "vlogger" replaced the "blogger."
As if all that were not enough the Internet's gatekeepers (search engines, social media platforms, syndicators of written content, etc.) went to war against "fake news" and "misinformation" and "extremism," which campaign was really cover for (besides an assault on those whose opinions are really offensive to Silicon Valley) a war against Internet small fry --because the endless fake news put out by the big media outlets, and of course by those who paid them for advertising, was just fine by them (all as even the most perniciously fake news-flogging small-timers got a pass if they did made the companies money by hooking users so they were subject to more ads), after which so-called "helpful" updates dealt those not on their good side one blow after another.
At that point many a blogger looking at their current level of traffic and comparing it to what they had even a short time earlier may have felt themselves in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but as is so often the way with the survivors holding on in such a hellscape in tales of that sort yet another threat emerged to threaten the survivors with final extermination. Those chatbots over which Silicon Valley's courtiers in the media gushed so stupidly, in the course of replacing increasingly broken old-fashioned search by taking questions and giving answers, were spared their users the trouble of actually going to sites for information. (A Perplexity, for example, gives its sources, but I suspect few bother with them any more than they do the endnotes when they read a book, if they ever do.) The result is that much less actual human visitation for the sites the chatbots consult, with TollBit telling us that this last has meant a 96 percent collapse in traffic to publishers compared with search engines, just one visit for every twenty-five they would have got before, with every sign that this tendency will only increase, and fast, in the months and years to come.
In short, since at least the early twenty-first century pretty much every new development seems to have gone against the independent blogger, rather than for them--against their chances of "discovery" by, let alone "engagement" with members of a potential audience--with, I think, besides the fact of AI giving the public its answers sans any need for conventional research efforts of their own, the fact that AI may increasingly be the generator of content online, the merely human writer forced to compete with ever-growing armies of chatbots pouring forth words on command, perhaps not brilliantly, but certainly with a speed and tirelessness and versatility no human with their own interests and passions can match, making talk of "competition" an absurdity.
In spite of it all I suspect many who have stuck it out this long will refuse to wholly give up. But it is certainly making their blogging for an audience of none likely to just go on shrinking from even that level an ever more thankless task, as many others decide that it is time to walk away.
Of the Attention Economy and the Real Economy
The "attention economy" is just like the rest of the economy to which it has become so integral. The chances of really big "success" are cynically and insanely overhyped, the luring of five thousand--five million--donkeys onward with a single carrot. Where the contest for that carrot is concerned it isn't a "level playing field," and it isn't a "meritocracy"--though this doesn't prevent people of small and conventional minds from insisting that they are. In what is very close to being a "winner take all" game the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Those who are in the former category get called "geniuses," regardless of whether they really merit the invidious label, while those who are in the latter category are sneered at as "losers," and anyone who is anything but satisfied with the outcome of their efforts is told that they have no one to blame but themselves, something many of them are sufficiently indoctrinated in the aforementioned conventionality to believe--while many more than will dare admit it don't believe, because the heresy in such thoughts is so little tolerated, and so consistently and brutally punished by the champions of orthodoxy without ever distressing the "free speech absolutists."
Life Without "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire" Syndrome
One of the most interesting aspects of Theodore Dreiser's A Book About Myself (for me, at least) was his frankness about how he felt facing the forbidding Rat Race as a young man of modest background, without the advantages that many of his rivals had--in part because of how rare it was, and remains, for those coming from such backgrounds to ever tell their stories, and also because so few of any background own up to feeling that way.
That attitude is the opposite of the outlook that has variously been called the "temporarily embarrassed capitalist," "temporarily embarrassed millionaire," and "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"--and I think it worth consideration for more than its obvious interests for a reader of classics like Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood saga or An American Tragedy.
After all, consider the hard reality of being in a winner-take-all society where, for all the pieties about "equality of opportunity" no person of any intelligence truly believes for a second that the competition is remotely equal in its openness to talent--but at the same time Authority demands that "everyone" fling themselves into the scramble with the utmost enthusiasm in the belief that somehow or other they will be the one winner who takes all, be the donkey in five thousand who gets the carrot, on the basis of . . . nothing whatsoever. It is not an expectation of rational behavior, but in fact a demand that one be irrational, irrational in a particular way. Indeed, should one fail to manifest said irrationality their peers and superiors are apt to accuse them of, if not being "lazy" or "shiftless," then of lacking in "confidence," "faith" or "optimism," all unforgivable character traits indeed in their eyes.
It is, of course, a far from socially neutral matter--the convenience of the elite resting upon this outlook. (That the lower orders should look at social arrangements in a calculating way, that workers should work to live rather than live to work, is an outrage from the standpoint of those who think the lower orders exist only for their convenience rather than in their own right. And an outrage especially for the businessmen who think that the prerogative of economic calculation be taken up by anyone else, the rest of humanity, whether as worker, consumer, public official or anything else properly an object on which they as the only subjects can exert their will.)
Still, irrational and exploitative as it all is, few question it, with Dreiser lamenting the fact but not offering any serious intellectual challenge to it. If he could not help being horrified by the order around him and wishing there was another way, and not just for him, he also felt himself to be lacking for feeling the way he did, and indeed writing his "Trilogy of Desire" Dreiser imagined Frank Cowperwood as the man he wished he was (while I dare say, in a Forbes Gurney, brutally satirizing the man he actually thought himself to be)--though his view would seem to have evolved afterward. In the book generally thought Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, in Clyde Griffiths he presented a protagonist who had what Dreiser felt to be lacking inside himself--but also an even less advantageous background--with all this figuring into how he believed in and played by the rules of the game, and the consequences following therefrom. Summing it up I cannot possibly do better than David Walsh, who characterizes the tale as one of a man who born into this society, and "fervently believes in that society and wishes nothing more than to be a respected member of it," to the point of a "willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself," and in the process only suffer being ground up by that machinery and destroyed over the book's near-thousand pages, the American Dream become American Nightmare ultimately the source of the American Tragedy in what may be the greatest indictment of that vision of life ever put to paper.
That attitude is the opposite of the outlook that has variously been called the "temporarily embarrassed capitalist," "temporarily embarrassed millionaire," and "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"--and I think it worth consideration for more than its obvious interests for a reader of classics like Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood saga or An American Tragedy.
After all, consider the hard reality of being in a winner-take-all society where, for all the pieties about "equality of opportunity" no person of any intelligence truly believes for a second that the competition is remotely equal in its openness to talent--but at the same time Authority demands that "everyone" fling themselves into the scramble with the utmost enthusiasm in the belief that somehow or other they will be the one winner who takes all, be the donkey in five thousand who gets the carrot, on the basis of . . . nothing whatsoever. It is not an expectation of rational behavior, but in fact a demand that one be irrational, irrational in a particular way. Indeed, should one fail to manifest said irrationality their peers and superiors are apt to accuse them of, if not being "lazy" or "shiftless," then of lacking in "confidence," "faith" or "optimism," all unforgivable character traits indeed in their eyes.
It is, of course, a far from socially neutral matter--the convenience of the elite resting upon this outlook. (That the lower orders should look at social arrangements in a calculating way, that workers should work to live rather than live to work, is an outrage from the standpoint of those who think the lower orders exist only for their convenience rather than in their own right. And an outrage especially for the businessmen who think that the prerogative of economic calculation be taken up by anyone else, the rest of humanity, whether as worker, consumer, public official or anything else properly an object on which they as the only subjects can exert their will.)
Still, irrational and exploitative as it all is, few question it, with Dreiser lamenting the fact but not offering any serious intellectual challenge to it. If he could not help being horrified by the order around him and wishing there was another way, and not just for him, he also felt himself to be lacking for feeling the way he did, and indeed writing his "Trilogy of Desire" Dreiser imagined Frank Cowperwood as the man he wished he was (while I dare say, in a Forbes Gurney, brutally satirizing the man he actually thought himself to be)--though his view would seem to have evolved afterward. In the book generally thought Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, in Clyde Griffiths he presented a protagonist who had what Dreiser felt to be lacking inside himself--but also an even less advantageous background--with all this figuring into how he believed in and played by the rules of the game, and the consequences following therefrom. Summing it up I cannot possibly do better than David Walsh, who characterizes the tale as one of a man who born into this society, and "fervently believes in that society and wishes nothing more than to be a respected member of it," to the point of a "willingness to sacrifice everything human in himself," and in the process only suffer being ground up by that machinery and destroyed over the book's near-thousand pages, the American Dream become American Nightmare ultimately the source of the American Tragedy in what may be the greatest indictment of that vision of life ever put to paper.
Unpacking the Term "Populist"
We hear the word "populist" a lot these days.
As is usually the case with words that get tossed around very much by the sub-literates of the Media Establishment the word could stand some unpacking.
Fortunately at the simple definitional level this word's meaning is not very difficult. The word "populist" is commonly defined as a political tendency championing the rights and the self-determination of "the people" against an "elite" with whom they are presumed to be at odds due to the latter in some way failing to respect, exploiting and/or oppressing the former.
However, from here things get much trickier. At this moment the bit of that trickiness that I want to deal with is the plain and simple fact that in speaking of "populism," and thus "the people," we are obliged to say something of just "who" the people are--how we define this category of person, what and how they presumably think and feel, and why this or that purported appeal to them merits the label "populist."
In considering that it is essential to note that those who toss around the label "populist" on platforms sufficiently visible for us to be sensible of their doing so are not "of the people"--precisely because the media is a thoroughly elite enterprise, especially at its higher levels. (In social provenance, in acculturation and training, in their present condition and their aspirations and their identifications and their loyalties this most visible section of the chattering classes are most certainly of and for the elite, all while from their life experience and their more intellectual activity having very little contact with or respect for those persons who are not.) This makes it quite natural for them to think of "the people" as those who are "not like us."
At the same time said elite, reflecting its essential conservatism, reinforced by a postmodernism that is itself very much of the right no matter how much people of conventional mind insist otherwise, is far more comfortable interpreting political matters from the standpoint of "culture" rather than hard economic interest or social reality. (Thus do they treat the kulturkampf as the center of American politics as they drone on ceaselessly about "Red" and "Blue" states, the key to American politics all lying in the coloring of an electronic map seen in their asinine coverage of a presidential election a generation ago.)
The result is that they think of the people as those who are "not like us," and of those who are like or not like them as like or not like them in cultural terms. In doing so the "elites" make much of their "education"--not only in the narrow academic sense (they are very proud of having gone to Good Schools, for what little good their expensive schooling did their minds), but the broader, Jane Austen-ish sense of a whole upbringing. Where that is concerned they are from the great urban areas of the coasts, and especially the East Coast; they have traveled about, because of their parents' careers, because of the educations they often had far from home, because of their own career trajectories. By contrast those who are not of the elite can less say the same, and often not at all. They come from provincial areas, and unless their family was forced to relocate by hardship, know little but those areas, with even if they have one this extending even to their college education, for rather than going to the Good School (doing which would likely have required them to sell themselves into debt slavery, not that the elites ever think about that) they probably went to the local state U, and maybe that just after a stint in community college, and after graduating looked for a job in their "hometown," their whole life lived within that likely none-too-sophisticated area.
The result is that "the elite" are "cosmopolitan," whereas "the people" are localist in orientation, rooted in community, with all the difference in "prejudices" that goes with that, with said elite more urbane about and open to the wider world, "the people" less so--the latter more "localist," more "rooted" in family and neighborhood and community, more creatures of whatever tradition they were raised in, more fearful and suspicious of that bigger world generally and anything different from what they were brought up with particularly. All of this has had particular consequences given the way that a neoliberalism that it has been fashionable to identify with "globalization," and the "information" or "knowledge" age, has been at the center of political and economic and social life, namely the framing of the issue of what "globalization" meant for working people as against the elite not in material terms but cultural ones. Accordingly, rather than facing up to backlash against globalization as a matter of reaction to the ravages of deindustrialization working people suffered as the fortunes of the super-rich surged, such observers saw it as a matter of cultural dislike, of, as Barack Obama supposedly had it, people unsatisfied by "empty cosmopolitanism" and "just want[ing] to fall back into their own tribe."
That choice of word, "tribe," seems especially revealing of the understanding of populism discussed here--the populists those appealing not to the economic interests of the broad public as against elite, not to the demand for justice by working people for social justice, but to tribalism. There are, of course, other words that fit such a politics better than "populism." However, using "populism" is convenient for the sub-literate poltroons because other words would be much more harshly critical of those they describe as populists. Indeed, critics of the use of the term "populism" and its derivatives find that it has all but become an euphemism for "extremist," "racist" and "fascist," far more charged words that the "centrists" of our media hesitate to use (given their anti-leftist conservatism, and the way it makes them much more squeamish about criticizing the hard right than even the mildly "liberal"). It is also the case that equating populism with extremism, racism and other such attitudes has been a way of identifying them with a public the elites neither know nor respect, and avoiding the extent to which elites espouse and promote and exploit those attitudes; making the latter appear the protectors of what civility endures in contemporary life; and even implying that the broad public's backwardness makes its social grievances undeserving of attention, with, again, reference to globalization relevant here, those negatively "impacted" by the march of the global economy having no one to blame but themselves in the view of those respectful of market outcomes, with their very intolerance the reason for their troubles in an era in which openness paid off, and the motivation behind their objections.
As is usually the case with words that get tossed around very much by the sub-literates of the Media Establishment the word could stand some unpacking.
Fortunately at the simple definitional level this word's meaning is not very difficult. The word "populist" is commonly defined as a political tendency championing the rights and the self-determination of "the people" against an "elite" with whom they are presumed to be at odds due to the latter in some way failing to respect, exploiting and/or oppressing the former.
However, from here things get much trickier. At this moment the bit of that trickiness that I want to deal with is the plain and simple fact that in speaking of "populism," and thus "the people," we are obliged to say something of just "who" the people are--how we define this category of person, what and how they presumably think and feel, and why this or that purported appeal to them merits the label "populist."
In considering that it is essential to note that those who toss around the label "populist" on platforms sufficiently visible for us to be sensible of their doing so are not "of the people"--precisely because the media is a thoroughly elite enterprise, especially at its higher levels. (In social provenance, in acculturation and training, in their present condition and their aspirations and their identifications and their loyalties this most visible section of the chattering classes are most certainly of and for the elite, all while from their life experience and their more intellectual activity having very little contact with or respect for those persons who are not.) This makes it quite natural for them to think of "the people" as those who are "not like us."
At the same time said elite, reflecting its essential conservatism, reinforced by a postmodernism that is itself very much of the right no matter how much people of conventional mind insist otherwise, is far more comfortable interpreting political matters from the standpoint of "culture" rather than hard economic interest or social reality. (Thus do they treat the kulturkampf as the center of American politics as they drone on ceaselessly about "Red" and "Blue" states, the key to American politics all lying in the coloring of an electronic map seen in their asinine coverage of a presidential election a generation ago.)
The result is that they think of the people as those who are "not like us," and of those who are like or not like them as like or not like them in cultural terms. In doing so the "elites" make much of their "education"--not only in the narrow academic sense (they are very proud of having gone to Good Schools, for what little good their expensive schooling did their minds), but the broader, Jane Austen-ish sense of a whole upbringing. Where that is concerned they are from the great urban areas of the coasts, and especially the East Coast; they have traveled about, because of their parents' careers, because of the educations they often had far from home, because of their own career trajectories. By contrast those who are not of the elite can less say the same, and often not at all. They come from provincial areas, and unless their family was forced to relocate by hardship, know little but those areas, with even if they have one this extending even to their college education, for rather than going to the Good School (doing which would likely have required them to sell themselves into debt slavery, not that the elites ever think about that) they probably went to the local state U, and maybe that just after a stint in community college, and after graduating looked for a job in their "hometown," their whole life lived within that likely none-too-sophisticated area.
The result is that "the elite" are "cosmopolitan," whereas "the people" are localist in orientation, rooted in community, with all the difference in "prejudices" that goes with that, with said elite more urbane about and open to the wider world, "the people" less so--the latter more "localist," more "rooted" in family and neighborhood and community, more creatures of whatever tradition they were raised in, more fearful and suspicious of that bigger world generally and anything different from what they were brought up with particularly. All of this has had particular consequences given the way that a neoliberalism that it has been fashionable to identify with "globalization," and the "information" or "knowledge" age, has been at the center of political and economic and social life, namely the framing of the issue of what "globalization" meant for working people as against the elite not in material terms but cultural ones. Accordingly, rather than facing up to backlash against globalization as a matter of reaction to the ravages of deindustrialization working people suffered as the fortunes of the super-rich surged, such observers saw it as a matter of cultural dislike, of, as Barack Obama supposedly had it, people unsatisfied by "empty cosmopolitanism" and "just want[ing] to fall back into their own tribe."
That choice of word, "tribe," seems especially revealing of the understanding of populism discussed here--the populists those appealing not to the economic interests of the broad public as against elite, not to the demand for justice by working people for social justice, but to tribalism. There are, of course, other words that fit such a politics better than "populism." However, using "populism" is convenient for the sub-literate poltroons because other words would be much more harshly critical of those they describe as populists. Indeed, critics of the use of the term "populism" and its derivatives find that it has all but become an euphemism for "extremist," "racist" and "fascist," far more charged words that the "centrists" of our media hesitate to use (given their anti-leftist conservatism, and the way it makes them much more squeamish about criticizing the hard right than even the mildly "liberal"). It is also the case that equating populism with extremism, racism and other such attitudes has been a way of identifying them with a public the elites neither know nor respect, and avoiding the extent to which elites espouse and promote and exploit those attitudes; making the latter appear the protectors of what civility endures in contemporary life; and even implying that the broad public's backwardness makes its social grievances undeserving of attention, with, again, reference to globalization relevant here, those negatively "impacted" by the march of the global economy having no one to blame but themselves in the view of those respectful of market outcomes, with their very intolerance the reason for their troubles in an era in which openness paid off, and the motivation behind their objections.
Comparing the Digital Age with the Fordist Era
In considering the question of whether the digital era has really lived up to the hype for it one option would seem to be to compare this ostensible economic revolution with the rather unquestionable economic revolution that preceded it, which we broadly speak of as "Fordism." Centering on the switchover from steam to electricity as the power source for the factory (enabling assembly lines and powered machine tools), it exploited that development by way of high-tech and high-capital standardized mass production and mass consumption oriented toward consumer culture as we know it.
In considering Fordism one should acknowledge that the development was a lengthy process, and that it did not equally affect all manufacturing. (Consider how the textile industry works to this day.) Still, this type of production was both sufficiently revolutionary in productivity, and sufficiently widespread, that in the first half of the twentieth century U.S. manufacturing as a whole saw its workers on a per-head basis produce two and even three times as much per hour as the country's closest industrial rivals Britain and Germany, while it enjoyed a still greater edge over other countries.
The result was that the U.S. had an economic output far, far out of proportion to its share of the world's population (accounting for perhaps half of world manufacturing value added at the end of World War II). And without romanticizing or oversimplifying what was a very complex and not always happy social reality this productivity meant that American incomes and living standards were higher than for their foreign counterparts, and indeed enabled the development in America of a novel way of life that much of the rest of the world aspired to imitate (auto-subtopian consumerism). Meanwhile, the combination of wealth and its utilization translated to an extraordinary position of U.S. power in the world, not just the "hard" power that came from immense American resources and their usage in ways from leveraging international financial institutions to foreign aid programs to the country's global military establishment, but the "soft" power that came with America's demonstrated ability to generate riches, and the way in which at least its better-off residents lived (or at least appeared to). One may add that it was other countries' assimilating that American-created model that enabled them to achieve their post-war "economic miracles" (exemplified by the German and Japanese cases, and later Korea and China), exploding their incomes and living standards and diminishing the American lead.
It would be very hard to argue that the digital revolution, which can be regarded as similarly having emerged in America given that the fundamental inventions (the transistor and the MOSFET transistor, computer networks like the ARPANet) were generally the product of research by American government agencies and American businesses like IBM, AT & T and Xerox, did anything like that for America's economy, living standards, power. Indeed, when we look away from the hype we find that the digital age has been one of, by comparison with what America enjoyed in the early and middle twentieth century, productivity growth so weak that it has been an "embarrassment" for economists. (Yes, the robotized car factory, the "mini-mill" that yields a ton of steel with as little as half a man-hour of labor, are wonders, but the big picture is another matter--with it seeming ironic that those heavy "smokestack" industrial areas where productivity growth has been meaningful are the exact ones that the champions of the digital age sneered at as "declining" and "sunset" industries irrelevant to the country's prosperity.) All this has been reflected in weaker economic growth, with the extent to which growth has been seen at all as very likely "hollow" given such evidences of "deindustrialization" (from stagnating and declining manufacturing value added, to chronic and colossal manufactured goods trading deficits, to the falling high-tech content of production (exemplified by petroleum products replacing aircraft and microchips as America's biggest export of the type).
Amid stagnant productivity, weak growth, deindustrialization, the experience of the American worker has been one of working harder for less--and indeed working Americans less and less able to enjoy that standard of living and that auto-subtopian way of life that once fascinated so many onlookers. The result is that these decades have, in spite of the bullishness of a significant part of the commentariat sure that deindustrialization must somehow be a matter of mere "growing pains" of the digital age (a view worn very thin as the experience has worn on), widely been perceived as an era of decline for American economic and especially industrial vitality, affluence and power at home and abroad--decline that the digital revolution obviously failed to stem, even though the world as a whole has suffered an epoch of slow productivity improvement and growth.
The result is that if there seem to be areas in which computers have brought new efficiencies and conveniences anyone looking to them for a genuine industrial revolution to compare with what Fordism wrought would seem to still be waiting for that to happen--just as Robert Gordon concluded was the case a quarter of a century ago. One may argue over why this is the case--whether there was potential for much more. What, for example, might have been the case had economic policymaking, in one form or another, favored investment in material production over "financialization," and raising labor productivity rather than lowering the price of labor? (After all, Fordism would not have developed anywhere near so fully as it did in the absence of the industrial policy, and other policy, that enabled it.) Still, however useful an exercise this might be (for instance, as a way of considering what courses of policy might be desirable now), they only affirm that in actuality we are in a very different place, one that in this case has been a disappointment as compared with what those who sang digitalization promised the world as the benefit of compliance with their vision.
In considering Fordism one should acknowledge that the development was a lengthy process, and that it did not equally affect all manufacturing. (Consider how the textile industry works to this day.) Still, this type of production was both sufficiently revolutionary in productivity, and sufficiently widespread, that in the first half of the twentieth century U.S. manufacturing as a whole saw its workers on a per-head basis produce two and even three times as much per hour as the country's closest industrial rivals Britain and Germany, while it enjoyed a still greater edge over other countries.
The result was that the U.S. had an economic output far, far out of proportion to its share of the world's population (accounting for perhaps half of world manufacturing value added at the end of World War II). And without romanticizing or oversimplifying what was a very complex and not always happy social reality this productivity meant that American incomes and living standards were higher than for their foreign counterparts, and indeed enabled the development in America of a novel way of life that much of the rest of the world aspired to imitate (auto-subtopian consumerism). Meanwhile, the combination of wealth and its utilization translated to an extraordinary position of U.S. power in the world, not just the "hard" power that came from immense American resources and their usage in ways from leveraging international financial institutions to foreign aid programs to the country's global military establishment, but the "soft" power that came with America's demonstrated ability to generate riches, and the way in which at least its better-off residents lived (or at least appeared to). One may add that it was other countries' assimilating that American-created model that enabled them to achieve their post-war "economic miracles" (exemplified by the German and Japanese cases, and later Korea and China), exploding their incomes and living standards and diminishing the American lead.
It would be very hard to argue that the digital revolution, which can be regarded as similarly having emerged in America given that the fundamental inventions (the transistor and the MOSFET transistor, computer networks like the ARPANet) were generally the product of research by American government agencies and American businesses like IBM, AT & T and Xerox, did anything like that for America's economy, living standards, power. Indeed, when we look away from the hype we find that the digital age has been one of, by comparison with what America enjoyed in the early and middle twentieth century, productivity growth so weak that it has been an "embarrassment" for economists. (Yes, the robotized car factory, the "mini-mill" that yields a ton of steel with as little as half a man-hour of labor, are wonders, but the big picture is another matter--with it seeming ironic that those heavy "smokestack" industrial areas where productivity growth has been meaningful are the exact ones that the champions of the digital age sneered at as "declining" and "sunset" industries irrelevant to the country's prosperity.) All this has been reflected in weaker economic growth, with the extent to which growth has been seen at all as very likely "hollow" given such evidences of "deindustrialization" (from stagnating and declining manufacturing value added, to chronic and colossal manufactured goods trading deficits, to the falling high-tech content of production (exemplified by petroleum products replacing aircraft and microchips as America's biggest export of the type).
Amid stagnant productivity, weak growth, deindustrialization, the experience of the American worker has been one of working harder for less--and indeed working Americans less and less able to enjoy that standard of living and that auto-subtopian way of life that once fascinated so many onlookers. The result is that these decades have, in spite of the bullishness of a significant part of the commentariat sure that deindustrialization must somehow be a matter of mere "growing pains" of the digital age (a view worn very thin as the experience has worn on), widely been perceived as an era of decline for American economic and especially industrial vitality, affluence and power at home and abroad--decline that the digital revolution obviously failed to stem, even though the world as a whole has suffered an epoch of slow productivity improvement and growth.
The result is that if there seem to be areas in which computers have brought new efficiencies and conveniences anyone looking to them for a genuine industrial revolution to compare with what Fordism wrought would seem to still be waiting for that to happen--just as Robert Gordon concluded was the case a quarter of a century ago. One may argue over why this is the case--whether there was potential for much more. What, for example, might have been the case had economic policymaking, in one form or another, favored investment in material production over "financialization," and raising labor productivity rather than lowering the price of labor? (After all, Fordism would not have developed anywhere near so fully as it did in the absence of the industrial policy, and other policy, that enabled it.) Still, however useful an exercise this might be (for instance, as a way of considering what courses of policy might be desirable now), they only affirm that in actuality we are in a very different place, one that in this case has been a disappointment as compared with what those who sang digitalization promised the world as the benefit of compliance with their vision.
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
My Posts on Gladiator II's Box Office Performance (Collected)
During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of Gladiator II I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.
June 24, 2023
Gladiator 2? Seriously?
The original Gladiator was a visual marvel, while being absolutely silly stuff from the standpoint of history. (Its plot was more like alternate history, and clumsily wrought alternate history at that, while it made Roman politics look like the spectacles of the WWE so in vogue about the time of the film's making.)
The result is that despite gestures in the direction of Anthony Mann-like historical epic it worked mainly as an action movie, and at that an '80s-style "You killed my favorite second cousin" action movie (betrayed super-soldier seeks revenge, etc.) with the novelty of a period setting--and its story wrapped up tidily at the end.
Especially as other such films having comparable success seems a long shot (thus did the attempts at imitation peter out fairly quickly in the early '00s), there seems no good reason to revisit it--especially a quarter of a century on when enthusiasm for any such idea must have declined, as the American public grew only more reserved toward period pieces.
But revisit it is what they are doing--the movie not only greenlit but actually in production.
My expectation is that extending an already silly narrative will produce something sillier still--all as few of the public show up, and the Hollywood Suits whose courtiers in the press ceaselessly talk them up to the general public as the "smartest guys in the room" will put another gaping hole in their studio's books.
April 18, 2024
Gladiator 2: What Are its Chances of Profitability?
The release of a new trailer for Gladiator 2 has, of course, caused a spike in chatter about the film--overwhelmingly enthusiastic, to go by what I have seen. The critical and commercial failure that was Ridley Scott's prior historical epic, Napoleon (and the fact that Napoleon's failure has been the norm for Scott's epics) seems utterly absent from the dialogue as instead the commentators, befitting their function as les claqueurs, fixate on Scott's one real "win" in the form with 2000's Gladiator--while overlooking any problems with the concept of a follow-up, which seem quite evident in the trailer they are celebrating. The movie, a sequel to a movie where both the hero and the villain died, and which presumably made what followed an "alternate history" given its extreme remoteness from the facts (the Roman Republic restored!), looks less like follow-up than do-over of the first, scaled-up and disguised as a sequel, with (per usual for Scott) the spectacle coming in far, far ahead of anything else for all the melodramatic implications of the bits of dialogue, the blaring music.
In fairness I think more people will show up for this one than did for Scott's "vision" of Napoleon as Arthur Fleck in period costume. But will enough of them show to justify the colossal expenditure on this movie?
As might be expected these days amid pandemic, inflation, elevated interest rates, strikes and much else Gladiator 2 is a movie that was massively budgeted to begin with and then went way overbudget--its cost of production nearly doubling from the original $165 million to the $310 million spent. We are told by journalists claiming access to "insiders" that the "net" cost of production was actually $250 million, but even if true (and the studios have been known to underreport costs here) that is still quite a bit of money--and just part of the total final bill. After all, counting promotion and distribution and other such expenses the ultimate outlay for a movie comes to two to three times the cost of production (certainly when we take into account post-theatrical promotion and distribution for home viewing, etc.). Working with the $250-$310 million range, this works out to somewhere between $500 million and $900 million or so.
Given the limits of post-theatrical earnings at least 60 percent of that will have to be made from ticket sales--which is to say, $300 to $550 million. Given that the studio typically keeps a bit less than half of the proceeds from the ticket sales one would have to picture a gross double that--somewhere between $600 million and $1.1 billion grossed just to get the production past break-even.
As it happened the first Gladiator made $460 million back in 2000--which works out to about $840 million in today's terms, or the mid-point of that range. That in itself is cause for concern, as it means the movie can do as well, or better than, its hugely successful predecessor, and still lose money. Exacerbating the problem is that such money is not so easily made now as it was just a few years ago, with sequels offering splashy spectacle in particular a tougher sell than before--and this specific movie a particularly unnecessary-looking sequel that, because of the plot of the first film, does not have the original's stars, appearing almost a quarter of a century after that first film. I do not think the public's interest can be taken for granted, while interest among the younger cohort, for which period pieces are a particularly tough sell, will be something to watch closely, along with the matter of just how spendthrift the film's backers and makers have been. My gut reaction is that if all it takes to get into the territory of profitability is $600 million (almost a third less than what the original made) this movie may have a tough time achieving that, but that it would be doable. By contrast the billion dollar, let alone the $1.1 billion, mark (far above the original's gross, and perhaps more than any movie may make this year according to at least one analyst) seems like a real longshot.
December 3, 2024
Is Gladiator 2 a Flop?
Admittedly the entertainment press doesn't think so.
Still, consider the situation as it stands.
Seventeen days into Gladiator II's international release the movie has collected $209 million internationally, while ten days into its North American release it has made $111 million in that market. Assuming not unreasonably that the movie has already made 80 percent of its international total by this point, and 60 percent of its North American total, one would expect the movie's final take to come to around $445 million. Alternatively were one to take the $185 million figure for the final domestic take implied by the calculations presented above and expect this to amount to 40 percent of the final worldwide gross the way the domestic take did for the original, one gets a figure of $460 million, some $15 million more, while if one is prepared to allow for a margin of $15 million the other way as well we get $475 million.
A gross in the range of $445-$475 million (which may be more than some see it making) may sound like a lot of money. The bullish will point out that this has the movie matching what the original made ($465 million), ignoring the dollar's losing almost half (46 percent) of its purchasing power since 2000 according to the Consumer Price Index. The result is that merely matching the original's gross in current dollars means the movie's making about half what the original did in real terms.
We get an even worse picture when we think in terms of the cost of the film. The original Gladiator was made for a little over $100 million, which permitted a very healthy profit indeed on a gross of (roughly) a half billion. By contrast the sequel would be making a half billion dollars--after an outlay of $250-$310 million on the production, an expenditure of two to three times as much.
We do not ordinarily think of a sequel that made half as much as the original as a success.
We also do not (given the economics of film production and distribution) think of a movie, or anything else, that costs three times as much as its predecessor for the same return a success, with this certainly carrying over to a movie that costs $250 million+ to make (and $120 million more to distribute and market) grossing a half billion dollars. And indeed, as I argued back in April, the bar for profitability may be higher for this one than the range discussed here--a loss still quite plausible even after the post-theatrical income from streaming, TV rights, physical media, etc. is taken into account.
Still, with rare exceptions the press has been fairly upbeat about how Gladiator 2 is doing.
A plausible explanation for the gap between rhetoric and reality is that the entertainment press is on the whole claquing for this one--at least in part because it fits in with the narrative that Hollywood so badly wants to believe, namely that, contrary to the evidence of 2023, and what must be regarded as the ambiguous evidence of the public response to the thinned-out release slate of a 2024 mere weeks short of its end, franchise-addicted Hollywood's formula for generating blockbusters remains viable. And it is not going to let a little thing like movies actually losing their backers money get in the way of that.
NOTE: The item was subject to some minor corrections on December 8, 2024.
Gladiator 2's Failure: Some Thoughts
Recently appraising Gladiator 2's box office performance I have inclined to the view that the movie is proving a commercial disappointment at the box office--not a total, The Marvels/Flash-style catastrophe, but far from what it would take to really justify a $300 million movie, and that the outcome was far from unforeseeable.
Consider the first Gladiator film that came out when many of those who voted in the recent presidential election were not yet even born. The movie was basically a blend of "You killed my favorite second cousin!" action movie with Attitude Era WWE in period costume. The approach had enough novelty, narratively, visually and in other ways to make for one of the more original and entertaining summertime spectacles of those years--but the film's cachet owed to its being taken for something more, the period setting evoking the epics of the last days of Old Hollywood, enough so to fool the more superficial critics into mistaking its puffed-up kayfabe (the ultimate wrestling feud!) for Historical Drama, and awarding it a slew of Oscars that action movies usually do not get, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (in a way, epitomizing Ridley Scott's career as a prolific maker of historical "epics" who apparently has no interest in or understanding of history whatsoever).
Alas, I suspect that the movie's just looking like an epic rather than actually being one limited its impression on viewers, with all that meant for any appetite for a return to Scott's Rome (the more in as the movie left even less room for a sequel than most, with hero and villain both dead, and history taking a wildly implausible turn in his story that would not stand up to any serious follow-up). And I dare say that the historical epics of old that Gladiator was able to exploit the existence of some nostalgia for in 2000 are that much more distant from the memory of today's moviegoing audience on the whole--all as, much as people enjoyed it, the original Gladiator doesn't generate much nostalgic pull of its own. (It's no Star Wars that way, no Top Gun, no 2002 Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man even.)
The result was that the very belated follow-up was just a transparent cash grab with a blend of sequel and remake as hazy as it is unimaginative, selling much more on spectacle than the predecessor did in an age in which audiences have had so much spectacle that it is ever harder to really make them feel that here is something they have never seen before--while American audiences, certainly, have long been harder to sell on this particular kind of spectacle, even if the movie has the benefit of being less shopworn than, for instance, the superheroic adventures of which they have seen so many. The resulting, tepid, appeal translated to a tepid response from ticket-buyers.
Is "Glicked" Confusing Perceptions of Gladiator 2's Box Office?
I remember how back in the summer of 2023 the media telling us that the "Barbenheimer" meme juxtaposed the two big feature film releases of July 21 of that year (Barbie and Oppenheimer) went "viral" online, Internet users reveling in the ironies of the contrast between a movie about plastic toys and a movie about (however much the media prefer to tell us it is about something, anything, else) THE DANGER OF NUCLEAR WAR THAT HANGS OVER ALL OF US EVER MORE THREATENINGLY AS OPPENHEIMER DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN HIMSELF SPELLED OUT TO THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS LEST ANYONE MISS THE POINT.
I don't know that I believe that the Barbenheimer stupidity really did go "viral" the way the media claimed it did--precisely because everything I have seen about how the Internet works has left me only more and more convinced that things really don't go viral that way, that indeed the media just tells us they did, because it helps them push a particular narrative.
Still, whether or not Barbenheimer really did go viral or not the phenomenon did have one important feature in common with the great majority of those things we are told went viral--namely that it is extremely stupid, and each and every unfortunate contact with it like nails on a chalkboard.
Naturally the media, which can never resist repeating its stupidities, seized on the chance to reuse the marketing concept by talking up "Glicked"--the release of a screen adaptation of the revisionist Broadway musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked, the same weekend as the bloody Roman pseudo-epic Gladiator II. (They slapped together the "Gl" from Gladiator and "icked" from Wicked. Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.)
The expectation was that just as Barbie and Oppenheimer both performed way above expectations at the box office, saving the until then really dismal summer season of 2023, so would Wicked and Gladiator. As it happened, neither movie quite lived up to the expectations observers held for it on their mutual opening weekend, each coming in under the range that Boxoffice Pro projected the Wednesday of their week of release.* Still, Wicked did just well enough then and after to be considered a very palpable hit (with $262 million banked after ten days in release, and decent prospects through the season), while Gladiator has . . . done less well. Apparently on track to end up with half what the original did after inflation, it may be that even with post-theatrical income counted in the movie will be reckoned a money-loser, though few seem willing to admit that. This is, I think, primarily because the entertainment press is pushing the narrative that Hollywood's model of blockbuster filmmaking is as salable as ever, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary--but it may be that the "Glicked" foolishness intended to help sell both movies is playing its part, predisposing observers to think of Gladiator II as a success, and even letting it benefit from association with the much more successful Wicked in the minds of the easily befuddled.
* Wicked, supposed to open with $120-$140 million, picked up only $114 million.
January 7, 2025
What Can We Say of Gladiator II Now?
Gladiator II opened in North America below expectations that had not been particularly high for a $250 million movie, let alone a high-profile sequel to a New Classic hitting theaters the Friday before Thanksgiving--grossing $55 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period (against the $60-$80 million Boxoffice Pro had consistently forecast for the preceding month). Of course, rather more than in the summer the holiday season sees films open less than impressively but much more than make up for it with very long legs (as James Cameron's three movies all managed to do on the way to high rankings on the all-time blockbuster lists). Gladiator II, however, did not prove one of these, as of its sixth weekend not much more than tripling its opening weekend gross ($163 million), leaving it with less than the original Gladiator took in current dollars, and maybe half what it made in real terms ($188 million back in the summer of 2000, $345 million when adjusted for November 2024 prices). The movie has done a little better in the international market than the original--as period pieces tend to do--but as the fact that the domestic/foreign split's about the same indicates (it was 42/58 in the case of the original, 38/62 in the case of the sequel), not enough so to make much difference.
The result is that the $450 million mark the much cheaper original reached at a time when that was more impressive than it is now is one toward which the movie is still straining, and may not quite make it--calling into question the movie's profitability. It will take a really robust post-theatrical performance to get the revenue to the break-even point, never mind past it--all as room remains to wonder if come the spring we will not see it on Deadline's list of the year's biggest money-losers.
June 24, 2023
Gladiator 2? Seriously?
The original Gladiator was a visual marvel, while being absolutely silly stuff from the standpoint of history. (Its plot was more like alternate history, and clumsily wrought alternate history at that, while it made Roman politics look like the spectacles of the WWE so in vogue about the time of the film's making.)
The result is that despite gestures in the direction of Anthony Mann-like historical epic it worked mainly as an action movie, and at that an '80s-style "You killed my favorite second cousin" action movie (betrayed super-soldier seeks revenge, etc.) with the novelty of a period setting--and its story wrapped up tidily at the end.
Especially as other such films having comparable success seems a long shot (thus did the attempts at imitation peter out fairly quickly in the early '00s), there seems no good reason to revisit it--especially a quarter of a century on when enthusiasm for any such idea must have declined, as the American public grew only more reserved toward period pieces.
But revisit it is what they are doing--the movie not only greenlit but actually in production.
My expectation is that extending an already silly narrative will produce something sillier still--all as few of the public show up, and the Hollywood Suits whose courtiers in the press ceaselessly talk them up to the general public as the "smartest guys in the room" will put another gaping hole in their studio's books.
April 18, 2024
Gladiator 2: What Are its Chances of Profitability?
The release of a new trailer for Gladiator 2 has, of course, caused a spike in chatter about the film--overwhelmingly enthusiastic, to go by what I have seen. The critical and commercial failure that was Ridley Scott's prior historical epic, Napoleon (and the fact that Napoleon's failure has been the norm for Scott's epics) seems utterly absent from the dialogue as instead the commentators, befitting their function as les claqueurs, fixate on Scott's one real "win" in the form with 2000's Gladiator--while overlooking any problems with the concept of a follow-up, which seem quite evident in the trailer they are celebrating. The movie, a sequel to a movie where both the hero and the villain died, and which presumably made what followed an "alternate history" given its extreme remoteness from the facts (the Roman Republic restored!), looks less like follow-up than do-over of the first, scaled-up and disguised as a sequel, with (per usual for Scott) the spectacle coming in far, far ahead of anything else for all the melodramatic implications of the bits of dialogue, the blaring music.
In fairness I think more people will show up for this one than did for Scott's "vision" of Napoleon as Arthur Fleck in period costume. But will enough of them show to justify the colossal expenditure on this movie?
As might be expected these days amid pandemic, inflation, elevated interest rates, strikes and much else Gladiator 2 is a movie that was massively budgeted to begin with and then went way overbudget--its cost of production nearly doubling from the original $165 million to the $310 million spent. We are told by journalists claiming access to "insiders" that the "net" cost of production was actually $250 million, but even if true (and the studios have been known to underreport costs here) that is still quite a bit of money--and just part of the total final bill. After all, counting promotion and distribution and other such expenses the ultimate outlay for a movie comes to two to three times the cost of production (certainly when we take into account post-theatrical promotion and distribution for home viewing, etc.). Working with the $250-$310 million range, this works out to somewhere between $500 million and $900 million or so.
Given the limits of post-theatrical earnings at least 60 percent of that will have to be made from ticket sales--which is to say, $300 to $550 million. Given that the studio typically keeps a bit less than half of the proceeds from the ticket sales one would have to picture a gross double that--somewhere between $600 million and $1.1 billion grossed just to get the production past break-even.
As it happened the first Gladiator made $460 million back in 2000--which works out to about $840 million in today's terms, or the mid-point of that range. That in itself is cause for concern, as it means the movie can do as well, or better than, its hugely successful predecessor, and still lose money. Exacerbating the problem is that such money is not so easily made now as it was just a few years ago, with sequels offering splashy spectacle in particular a tougher sell than before--and this specific movie a particularly unnecessary-looking sequel that, because of the plot of the first film, does not have the original's stars, appearing almost a quarter of a century after that first film. I do not think the public's interest can be taken for granted, while interest among the younger cohort, for which period pieces are a particularly tough sell, will be something to watch closely, along with the matter of just how spendthrift the film's backers and makers have been. My gut reaction is that if all it takes to get into the territory of profitability is $600 million (almost a third less than what the original made) this movie may have a tough time achieving that, but that it would be doable. By contrast the billion dollar, let alone the $1.1 billion, mark (far above the original's gross, and perhaps more than any movie may make this year according to at least one analyst) seems like a real longshot.
December 3, 2024
Is Gladiator 2 a Flop?
Admittedly the entertainment press doesn't think so.
Still, consider the situation as it stands.
Seventeen days into Gladiator II's international release the movie has collected $209 million internationally, while ten days into its North American release it has made $111 million in that market. Assuming not unreasonably that the movie has already made 80 percent of its international total by this point, and 60 percent of its North American total, one would expect the movie's final take to come to around $445 million. Alternatively were one to take the $185 million figure for the final domestic take implied by the calculations presented above and expect this to amount to 40 percent of the final worldwide gross the way the domestic take did for the original, one gets a figure of $460 million, some $15 million more, while if one is prepared to allow for a margin of $15 million the other way as well we get $475 million.
A gross in the range of $445-$475 million (which may be more than some see it making) may sound like a lot of money. The bullish will point out that this has the movie matching what the original made ($465 million), ignoring the dollar's losing almost half (46 percent) of its purchasing power since 2000 according to the Consumer Price Index. The result is that merely matching the original's gross in current dollars means the movie's making about half what the original did in real terms.
We get an even worse picture when we think in terms of the cost of the film. The original Gladiator was made for a little over $100 million, which permitted a very healthy profit indeed on a gross of (roughly) a half billion. By contrast the sequel would be making a half billion dollars--after an outlay of $250-$310 million on the production, an expenditure of two to three times as much.
We do not ordinarily think of a sequel that made half as much as the original as a success.
We also do not (given the economics of film production and distribution) think of a movie, or anything else, that costs three times as much as its predecessor for the same return a success, with this certainly carrying over to a movie that costs $250 million+ to make (and $120 million more to distribute and market) grossing a half billion dollars. And indeed, as I argued back in April, the bar for profitability may be higher for this one than the range discussed here--a loss still quite plausible even after the post-theatrical income from streaming, TV rights, physical media, etc. is taken into account.
Still, with rare exceptions the press has been fairly upbeat about how Gladiator 2 is doing.
A plausible explanation for the gap between rhetoric and reality is that the entertainment press is on the whole claquing for this one--at least in part because it fits in with the narrative that Hollywood so badly wants to believe, namely that, contrary to the evidence of 2023, and what must be regarded as the ambiguous evidence of the public response to the thinned-out release slate of a 2024 mere weeks short of its end, franchise-addicted Hollywood's formula for generating blockbusters remains viable. And it is not going to let a little thing like movies actually losing their backers money get in the way of that.
NOTE: The item was subject to some minor corrections on December 8, 2024.
Gladiator 2's Failure: Some Thoughts
Recently appraising Gladiator 2's box office performance I have inclined to the view that the movie is proving a commercial disappointment at the box office--not a total, The Marvels/Flash-style catastrophe, but far from what it would take to really justify a $300 million movie, and that the outcome was far from unforeseeable.
Consider the first Gladiator film that came out when many of those who voted in the recent presidential election were not yet even born. The movie was basically a blend of "You killed my favorite second cousin!" action movie with Attitude Era WWE in period costume. The approach had enough novelty, narratively, visually and in other ways to make for one of the more original and entertaining summertime spectacles of those years--but the film's cachet owed to its being taken for something more, the period setting evoking the epics of the last days of Old Hollywood, enough so to fool the more superficial critics into mistaking its puffed-up kayfabe (the ultimate wrestling feud!) for Historical Drama, and awarding it a slew of Oscars that action movies usually do not get, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (in a way, epitomizing Ridley Scott's career as a prolific maker of historical "epics" who apparently has no interest in or understanding of history whatsoever).
Alas, I suspect that the movie's just looking like an epic rather than actually being one limited its impression on viewers, with all that meant for any appetite for a return to Scott's Rome (the more in as the movie left even less room for a sequel than most, with hero and villain both dead, and history taking a wildly implausible turn in his story that would not stand up to any serious follow-up). And I dare say that the historical epics of old that Gladiator was able to exploit the existence of some nostalgia for in 2000 are that much more distant from the memory of today's moviegoing audience on the whole--all as, much as people enjoyed it, the original Gladiator doesn't generate much nostalgic pull of its own. (It's no Star Wars that way, no Top Gun, no 2002 Sam Raimi-helmed Spider-Man even.)
The result was that the very belated follow-up was just a transparent cash grab with a blend of sequel and remake as hazy as it is unimaginative, selling much more on spectacle than the predecessor did in an age in which audiences have had so much spectacle that it is ever harder to really make them feel that here is something they have never seen before--while American audiences, certainly, have long been harder to sell on this particular kind of spectacle, even if the movie has the benefit of being less shopworn than, for instance, the superheroic adventures of which they have seen so many. The resulting, tepid, appeal translated to a tepid response from ticket-buyers.
Is "Glicked" Confusing Perceptions of Gladiator 2's Box Office?
I remember how back in the summer of 2023 the media telling us that the "Barbenheimer" meme juxtaposed the two big feature film releases of July 21 of that year (Barbie and Oppenheimer) went "viral" online, Internet users reveling in the ironies of the contrast between a movie about plastic toys and a movie about (however much the media prefer to tell us it is about something, anything, else) THE DANGER OF NUCLEAR WAR THAT HANGS OVER ALL OF US EVER MORE THREATENINGLY AS OPPENHEIMER DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN HIMSELF SPELLED OUT TO THE BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS LEST ANYONE MISS THE POINT.
I don't know that I believe that the Barbenheimer stupidity really did go "viral" the way the media claimed it did--precisely because everything I have seen about how the Internet works has left me only more and more convinced that things really don't go viral that way, that indeed the media just tells us they did, because it helps them push a particular narrative.
Still, whether or not Barbenheimer really did go viral or not the phenomenon did have one important feature in common with the great majority of those things we are told went viral--namely that it is extremely stupid, and each and every unfortunate contact with it like nails on a chalkboard.
Naturally the media, which can never resist repeating its stupidities, seized on the chance to reuse the marketing concept by talking up "Glicked"--the release of a screen adaptation of the revisionist Broadway musical prequel to The Wizard of Oz, Wicked, the same weekend as the bloody Roman pseudo-epic Gladiator II. (They slapped together the "Gl" from Gladiator and "icked" from Wicked. Get it? Ha. Ha. Ha.)
The expectation was that just as Barbie and Oppenheimer both performed way above expectations at the box office, saving the until then really dismal summer season of 2023, so would Wicked and Gladiator. As it happened, neither movie quite lived up to the expectations observers held for it on their mutual opening weekend, each coming in under the range that Boxoffice Pro projected the Wednesday of their week of release.* Still, Wicked did just well enough then and after to be considered a very palpable hit (with $262 million banked after ten days in release, and decent prospects through the season), while Gladiator has . . . done less well. Apparently on track to end up with half what the original did after inflation, it may be that even with post-theatrical income counted in the movie will be reckoned a money-loser, though few seem willing to admit that. This is, I think, primarily because the entertainment press is pushing the narrative that Hollywood's model of blockbuster filmmaking is as salable as ever, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary--but it may be that the "Glicked" foolishness intended to help sell both movies is playing its part, predisposing observers to think of Gladiator II as a success, and even letting it benefit from association with the much more successful Wicked in the minds of the easily befuddled.
* Wicked, supposed to open with $120-$140 million, picked up only $114 million.
January 7, 2025
What Can We Say of Gladiator II Now?
Gladiator II opened in North America below expectations that had not been particularly high for a $250 million movie, let alone a high-profile sequel to a New Classic hitting theaters the Friday before Thanksgiving--grossing $55 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period (against the $60-$80 million Boxoffice Pro had consistently forecast for the preceding month). Of course, rather more than in the summer the holiday season sees films open less than impressively but much more than make up for it with very long legs (as James Cameron's three movies all managed to do on the way to high rankings on the all-time blockbuster lists). Gladiator II, however, did not prove one of these, as of its sixth weekend not much more than tripling its opening weekend gross ($163 million), leaving it with less than the original Gladiator took in current dollars, and maybe half what it made in real terms ($188 million back in the summer of 2000, $345 million when adjusted for November 2024 prices). The movie has done a little better in the international market than the original--as period pieces tend to do--but as the fact that the domestic/foreign split's about the same indicates (it was 42/58 in the case of the original, 38/62 in the case of the sequel), not enough so to make much difference.
The result is that the $450 million mark the much cheaper original reached at a time when that was more impressive than it is now is one toward which the movie is still straining, and may not quite make it--calling into question the movie's profitability. It will take a really robust post-theatrical performance to get the revenue to the break-even point, never mind past it--all as room remains to wonder if come the spring we will not see it on Deadline's list of the year's biggest money-losers.
My Posts on the DCEU's Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom's (aka Aquaman 2)'s Box Office Performance (Collected)
During the run-up to and aftermath of the release of the DCEU's feature film Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom I tracked the discussion of the movie's box office prospects, and then its actual theatrical performance, as well as the fallout therefrom. For convenience's sake I have gathered together the items (some of them fairly short) on this one page, in order of appearance and dated--while also updating the links from posts referencing them so that they all lead here.
June 6, 2023
Aquaman 2, China and the Film's Chances of a $1 Billion Gross
Aquaman is, to date, the biggest money-maker the DCEU ever had--and its only current-dollar billion-dollar hit. However, the movie was only a "respectable" grosser at home by first-rank superhero movie standards (its $335 million rather less than what Wonder Woman made the year before). What really put it over the top was its especially strong overseas gross--accounting for some 71 percent of its worldwide income (also a franchise high).
The result is that, all other things being equal, one might hope for a strong performance on the part of the sequel, with even a significant drop in the real-terms gross from the original's ($1.15 billion when it came out in December 2018, more like $1.4 billion in 2023 dollars) allowing it to be the kind of $1 billion hit so elusive for Hollywood's live-action films these days.
Alas, all things are not equal, with one factor well worth remembering that China was especially important in making the movie such a success. (Without its $292 million gross there the movie would have ended its run with just $850 million.)
With China so important--accounting for a quarter of the worldwide box office gross--should Aquaman 2 suffer the way many more recent American releases have in China the film could already be expected to do significantly less well. (Should, for example, the film do only half the business in China that its predecessor did--which would be a lot better than, say, the Ant-Man sequel managed--that would in today's terms mean almost $200 million off the top.) Meanwhile the movie faces other, significant, headwinds:
* The five year wait since the last film--and the slight turnout of DCEU films in those five years, with all that meant for sustaining interest in, or even awareness of, the brand.
* The end of the DCEU as we know it, undermining any attempt to make Aquaman 2 "an event."
* Bad (frankly, very bad) buzz about the film itself.
It may also be that The Flash, if indeed poorly received after the breathless hype (as seems possible), may not be helpful to the next DCEU release.
The result is that, if Aquaman 2 is, apart from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which has missed its chance), and Indiana Jones 5 (the prospects of which are fading), the most likely contender for a $1 billion gross of any live-action movie coming out this year, I can easily picture it too falling short of the mark.
July 10, 2023
What Will Aquaman 2 Make? A Box Office Prediction
In considering what the final DCEU film, Aquaman 2, may make later this year one can find a basis for guesses in analogies with other comparable films--and application of these to what might be expected for it on the basis of the original Aquaman.
An obvious starting point is how major superhero franchise films have been doing lately--with and without the China market over which so many question marks hang (and which was so important to the first Aquaman movie's success).
At one end of the spectrum Guardians of the Galaxy 2 made $864 million at the global box office--which comes to $1.07 billion in May 2023 dollars. Without China's $100 million in ticket sales it comes to more like $948 million.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is likely to finish up with not much less than the original in current dollars--about $850 million. Without China the figure is more like $763 million. The result is that the film's gross is, in China's absence, about a fifth down, and this the best any such movie seems likely to do these days.
At the other end of the spectrum Black Panther 2 made just over half (53 percent) of what the original Black Panther did in real terms. Exclusion from China was a factor, but even when we set China aside the movie still made just 58 percent of what the original did.
So let us assume that in the best-case scenario the movie makes 80 percent of what the original did outside China, in the worst-case scenario, just 60 percent.
Meanwhile let us consider the film's prospects in China. In the worst case the film will not come out there at all, but should it come out one may take the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man franchises as suggestive of the range. In China Guardians of the Galaxy 3 did, if less well than elsewhere, relatively well by the standards of Hollywood in China these days, taking in 70 percent of what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did. By contrast Ant-Man 3 took in just 30 percent of what Ant-Man 2 did there.
In May 2023 dollars Aquaman took in $1.04 billion outside China. It also took in $350 million in China, for a take of nearly $1.4 billion overall.
The most positive scenario, with 80 percent of the non-China gross, and 70 percent of the China gross, of the original, would come to a $1.09 billion total take (less than a quarter down from the original's gross).
The least positive scenario within the range discussed here would come to more like $730 million (scarcely half what the original made).
Round for the nearest fifty million, and you end up with a range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, with, splitting the difference, somewhere around $900 million the middle of the range.
If a significant comedown from what might have been hoped from the strength of the original's reception, this would probably be the best gross of any superhero movie, or any live-action movie, this year. However, just as this kind of calculation was (as I warned back in April and as has since been amply confirmed) overoptimistic in the case of Indiana Jones 5 (which conventionally should have been a safe bet for a billion-dollar gross given the performance of prior entries in the series), given the headwinds it faced (which have all too clearly mattered), so it may be with Aquaman 2--given very poor buzz about the quality of the film, the way the DCEU seems to be going less than gracefully, the poor impression made by the overhyping and subsequent disappointing reception of The Flash. Indeed, just as I warned about the possibility of a Solo-like collapse on the part of Indiana Jones 5, so does it seem worth warning about the possibility of a similar collapse in the case of Aquaman 2. Just as Indiana Jones 5 now looks like it will struggle to make forty percent of what might have been normally expected for it (and Aquaman 2's preceding DCEU universe film, The Flash, looks as if it is doing the same Aquaman 2, instead of the circa $900 million that could be expected for it amid the lowered expectations of today's global box office, could likewise find itself falling short of the half billion dollar mark, and even the $400 million mark.
To sum up: in May 2023 dollars, a likely range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, $900 million as the figure I think most likely assuming a "normal" run, with, not to be forgotten, a real prospect of collapse seeing it make less than half that (<$400 million) in these not-so-normal times.
November 3, 2023
Fandango's Poll and Aquaman 2
Fandango's recent poll found that the film movie audiences seem to be looking forward to most is Captain Marvel 2.
Aquaman 2 came right after it.
Right now Captain Marvel 2's prospects are none too bright. The implication is that Aquaman 2 will do worse--this sequel to the DCEU's biggest hit (its sole billion-dollar hit) ending up on a level with its poorest performer by far, The Flash.
If so it would be another blow to the increasingly battered DCEU, and the increasingly shaky superhero genre of which it has been so large a part this past decade—and box office-watchers should keep the possibility in mind as the tracking-based estimates for the movie start going public in the coming weeks.
November 24, 2023
Aquaman 2: Boxoffice Pro Posts its First Long-Range Forecast for the Film's Domestic Gross
Considering Aquaman 2 (aka Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) I did wonder if the movie would not defy the trend of franchise failure. After all, the first Aquaman film was relatively well-received, this only the second film in the sequence (in contrast with characters of which the public had had time to grow more weary), and the trailer looked very credible (certainly a lot more exciting than the one for Captain Marvel 2). Still, the pattern of failure has been fairly consistent (underlined even by the only comparative success of Guardians of the Galaxy 3), the always more vulnerable DC Extended Universe has done very badly indeed this year (with Shazam 2, Blue Beetle and of course The Flash), while the fact that the DCEU is not so much building to a triumphant climax as being handled like a canceled TV show "burning off" its last unaired episodes. The result is that I tried not to be overly negative, but all the same, taking up the subject back in July it seemed to me necessary to allow for a scenario of collapse at the box office in which the film fell short of not just the billion-dollar barrier the first such movie broke, but >$400 million globally.
Now Boxoffice Pro (just as it did with Captain Marvel 2 back in October) is affirming the anticipation of collapse with the publication of its first tracking data-based long-range forecast for the film, specifically an opening weekend take in the range of $32-$42 million (versus The Flash's $55 million and Captain Marvel 2's $47 million), and a domestic total range of $105-$168 million (such that at the low end it could take in less than The Flash). Compared with the first film the total gross would be about 60 to 75 percent less than the movie made in real terms ($335 million in 2018-2019, equaling $410 million in today's terms), a drop comparable to what Captain Marvel 2 suffered in comparison with the first Captain Marvel film.
Such figures make a very considerable worldwide multiplier necessary to turn a domestic performance like this one into a respectable, break even-approaching earner, and alas, in contrast with that other series that Aquaman star Jason Momoa appeared in this year, Fast and Furious, this series has little such hope. Fast X made four times its domestic gross internationally ($559 million to its $146 million in North America)--but superhero movies, a particularly American passion, tend not to do so well internationally, with the first Aquaman, which made about two-and-a-half times what it did domestically abroad, as good as it gets. Moreover, one should note that this was overwhelmingly due to a very strong response from China, which is very unlikely to be forthcoming this time given the reception of more recent American films there. The result is that Aquaman 2 would be doing well to make three times its domestic gross globally, which in even the most positive current scenario detailed by Boxoffice Pro would leave it a half billion at best, as much worse becomes imaginable (such that it could end up with a lot less than $400 million).
Of course, there is still a month to go before that movie actually hits theaters--but as The Flash and Captain Marvel 2 both showed, the movie's prospects could decay rather than improve, while, even if the faintness of the competition this year should seem a point in the movie's favor, it by no means guarantees its "cleaning up." The way the box office works these days the lack of appetizing alternatives on the menu does not mean that others will order up this one--and so for now the safest guess would seem to be the DCEU's last movie concluding the franchise's run with a whimper rather than a roar of triumph, with all that implies for the fantasy of a mighty new DCEU finally satisfying the WBD's longstanding Marvel envy, to say nothing of the superhero film, the franchise film, the blockbuster as we know it more broadly and the fate of a Hollywood which, battered by events beyond its control (like the pandemic, and the geopolitical turn hurting it in China) has also inflicted plenty of wounds on itself--while showing not the least sign of behaving more intelligently in the years ahead.
January 26, 2024
Aquaman 2 vs. Captain Marvel 2 at the Box Office
In a month of global release Aquaman 2 has collected almost $400 million at the worldwide box office.
Compared to the original film (which took in almost a billion dollars more in its run in inflation-adjusted terms), this is a disaster--a gross of less than one-third of what its predecessor made. Indeed, the neighborhood of $400 million was about what I estimated back in September when talking about a scenario of collapse for the Aquaman series.
However, there is no question that it is far superior to what that obvious point of comparison, Captain Marvel 2, managed in the same season--about twice as much in fact (Captain Marvel 2 having barely broken the $200 million barrier before hitting streaming). One may add that the Aquaman sequel did this in spite of having its own burden of unhelpful factors, like the equally long wait since the last film (five rather long years from the end of 2018 to the end of 2023), the fact that it was coming after not a comparative hit for its "cinematic universe" the way Captain Marvel 2 did (the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, if not all that might have been hoped for, still pulling in over $800 million just a half year before Marvel hit theaters) but the debacle that was the release of The Flash, and the weakness of its own promotional campaign, which gave many the impression that the studio was all but refusing to throw good money after bad.
Does this at all refute the claims of superhero fatigue and franchise fatigue? Absolutely not. In fact it confirms them when we consider just how badly one megabudgeted superhero epic after another flopped, especially from June forward, underlining how little the audience's showing up for them can be taken for granted now as compared with before the pandemic. Still, I am doubtful that those who make the decisions will heed the lessons. Rather I suspect that the studio bosses will seize on anything and everything that can seem to justify their "staying the course"--treating Aquaman 2 as a comparative success story for not doing as badly as Captain Marvel 2, even with so much against it (and play up the reception of Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and anything else they can think of), as grounds that they can still make this work--that all they need is better writers" and more "adult supervision" for directors, and all will be well--all as the onlookers well aware that they are just digging a bigger hole for themselves await their chance to once more tell them "I told you so."
February 2, 2024
How Did Aquaman 2 Play in China?
Back in 2018 a significant factor in the first Aquaman film's success was its exceptionally robust performance internationally, especially in China. Grossing just short of $292 million there, this made it the DCEU's sole billion-dollar success to date (and that when, five inflationary years earlier, a billion was worth quite a bit more than it is now).
Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.
This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)
The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.
* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.
June 6, 2023
Aquaman 2, China and the Film's Chances of a $1 Billion Gross
Aquaman is, to date, the biggest money-maker the DCEU ever had--and its only current-dollar billion-dollar hit. However, the movie was only a "respectable" grosser at home by first-rank superhero movie standards (its $335 million rather less than what Wonder Woman made the year before). What really put it over the top was its especially strong overseas gross--accounting for some 71 percent of its worldwide income (also a franchise high).
The result is that, all other things being equal, one might hope for a strong performance on the part of the sequel, with even a significant drop in the real-terms gross from the original's ($1.15 billion when it came out in December 2018, more like $1.4 billion in 2023 dollars) allowing it to be the kind of $1 billion hit so elusive for Hollywood's live-action films these days.
Alas, all things are not equal, with one factor well worth remembering that China was especially important in making the movie such a success. (Without its $292 million gross there the movie would have ended its run with just $850 million.)
With China so important--accounting for a quarter of the worldwide box office gross--should Aquaman 2 suffer the way many more recent American releases have in China the film could already be expected to do significantly less well. (Should, for example, the film do only half the business in China that its predecessor did--which would be a lot better than, say, the Ant-Man sequel managed--that would in today's terms mean almost $200 million off the top.) Meanwhile the movie faces other, significant, headwinds:
* The five year wait since the last film--and the slight turnout of DCEU films in those five years, with all that meant for sustaining interest in, or even awareness of, the brand.
* The end of the DCEU as we know it, undermining any attempt to make Aquaman 2 "an event."
* Bad (frankly, very bad) buzz about the film itself.
It may also be that The Flash, if indeed poorly received after the breathless hype (as seems possible), may not be helpful to the next DCEU release.
The result is that, if Aquaman 2 is, apart from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which has missed its chance), and Indiana Jones 5 (the prospects of which are fading), the most likely contender for a $1 billion gross of any live-action movie coming out this year, I can easily picture it too falling short of the mark.
July 10, 2023
What Will Aquaman 2 Make? A Box Office Prediction
In considering what the final DCEU film, Aquaman 2, may make later this year one can find a basis for guesses in analogies with other comparable films--and application of these to what might be expected for it on the basis of the original Aquaman.
An obvious starting point is how major superhero franchise films have been doing lately--with and without the China market over which so many question marks hang (and which was so important to the first Aquaman movie's success).
At one end of the spectrum Guardians of the Galaxy 2 made $864 million at the global box office--which comes to $1.07 billion in May 2023 dollars. Without China's $100 million in ticket sales it comes to more like $948 million.
Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is likely to finish up with not much less than the original in current dollars--about $850 million. Without China the figure is more like $763 million. The result is that the film's gross is, in China's absence, about a fifth down, and this the best any such movie seems likely to do these days.
At the other end of the spectrum Black Panther 2 made just over half (53 percent) of what the original Black Panther did in real terms. Exclusion from China was a factor, but even when we set China aside the movie still made just 58 percent of what the original did.
So let us assume that in the best-case scenario the movie makes 80 percent of what the original did outside China, in the worst-case scenario, just 60 percent.
Meanwhile let us consider the film's prospects in China. In the worst case the film will not come out there at all, but should it come out one may take the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man franchises as suggestive of the range. In China Guardians of the Galaxy 3 did, if less well than elsewhere, relatively well by the standards of Hollywood in China these days, taking in 70 percent of what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did. By contrast Ant-Man 3 took in just 30 percent of what Ant-Man 2 did there.
In May 2023 dollars Aquaman took in $1.04 billion outside China. It also took in $350 million in China, for a take of nearly $1.4 billion overall.
The most positive scenario, with 80 percent of the non-China gross, and 70 percent of the China gross, of the original, would come to a $1.09 billion total take (less than a quarter down from the original's gross).
The least positive scenario within the range discussed here would come to more like $730 million (scarcely half what the original made).
Round for the nearest fifty million, and you end up with a range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, with, splitting the difference, somewhere around $900 million the middle of the range.
If a significant comedown from what might have been hoped from the strength of the original's reception, this would probably be the best gross of any superhero movie, or any live-action movie, this year. However, just as this kind of calculation was (as I warned back in April and as has since been amply confirmed) overoptimistic in the case of Indiana Jones 5 (which conventionally should have been a safe bet for a billion-dollar gross given the performance of prior entries in the series), given the headwinds it faced (which have all too clearly mattered), so it may be with Aquaman 2--given very poor buzz about the quality of the film, the way the DCEU seems to be going less than gracefully, the poor impression made by the overhyping and subsequent disappointing reception of The Flash. Indeed, just as I warned about the possibility of a Solo-like collapse on the part of Indiana Jones 5, so does it seem worth warning about the possibility of a similar collapse in the case of Aquaman 2. Just as Indiana Jones 5 now looks like it will struggle to make forty percent of what might have been normally expected for it (and Aquaman 2's preceding DCEU universe film, The Flash, looks as if it is doing the same Aquaman 2, instead of the circa $900 million that could be expected for it amid the lowered expectations of today's global box office, could likewise find itself falling short of the half billion dollar mark, and even the $400 million mark.
To sum up: in May 2023 dollars, a likely range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, $900 million as the figure I think most likely assuming a "normal" run, with, not to be forgotten, a real prospect of collapse seeing it make less than half that (<$400 million) in these not-so-normal times.
November 3, 2023
Fandango's Poll and Aquaman 2
Fandango's recent poll found that the film movie audiences seem to be looking forward to most is Captain Marvel 2.
Aquaman 2 came right after it.
Right now Captain Marvel 2's prospects are none too bright. The implication is that Aquaman 2 will do worse--this sequel to the DCEU's biggest hit (its sole billion-dollar hit) ending up on a level with its poorest performer by far, The Flash.
If so it would be another blow to the increasingly battered DCEU, and the increasingly shaky superhero genre of which it has been so large a part this past decade—and box office-watchers should keep the possibility in mind as the tracking-based estimates for the movie start going public in the coming weeks.
November 24, 2023
Aquaman 2: Boxoffice Pro Posts its First Long-Range Forecast for the Film's Domestic Gross
Considering Aquaman 2 (aka Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom) I did wonder if the movie would not defy the trend of franchise failure. After all, the first Aquaman film was relatively well-received, this only the second film in the sequence (in contrast with characters of which the public had had time to grow more weary), and the trailer looked very credible (certainly a lot more exciting than the one for Captain Marvel 2). Still, the pattern of failure has been fairly consistent (underlined even by the only comparative success of Guardians of the Galaxy 3), the always more vulnerable DC Extended Universe has done very badly indeed this year (with Shazam 2, Blue Beetle and of course The Flash), while the fact that the DCEU is not so much building to a triumphant climax as being handled like a canceled TV show "burning off" its last unaired episodes. The result is that I tried not to be overly negative, but all the same, taking up the subject back in July it seemed to me necessary to allow for a scenario of collapse at the box office in which the film fell short of not just the billion-dollar barrier the first such movie broke, but >$400 million globally.
Now Boxoffice Pro (just as it did with Captain Marvel 2 back in October) is affirming the anticipation of collapse with the publication of its first tracking data-based long-range forecast for the film, specifically an opening weekend take in the range of $32-$42 million (versus The Flash's $55 million and Captain Marvel 2's $47 million), and a domestic total range of $105-$168 million (such that at the low end it could take in less than The Flash). Compared with the first film the total gross would be about 60 to 75 percent less than the movie made in real terms ($335 million in 2018-2019, equaling $410 million in today's terms), a drop comparable to what Captain Marvel 2 suffered in comparison with the first Captain Marvel film.
Such figures make a very considerable worldwide multiplier necessary to turn a domestic performance like this one into a respectable, break even-approaching earner, and alas, in contrast with that other series that Aquaman star Jason Momoa appeared in this year, Fast and Furious, this series has little such hope. Fast X made four times its domestic gross internationally ($559 million to its $146 million in North America)--but superhero movies, a particularly American passion, tend not to do so well internationally, with the first Aquaman, which made about two-and-a-half times what it did domestically abroad, as good as it gets. Moreover, one should note that this was overwhelmingly due to a very strong response from China, which is very unlikely to be forthcoming this time given the reception of more recent American films there. The result is that Aquaman 2 would be doing well to make three times its domestic gross globally, which in even the most positive current scenario detailed by Boxoffice Pro would leave it a half billion at best, as much worse becomes imaginable (such that it could end up with a lot less than $400 million).
Of course, there is still a month to go before that movie actually hits theaters--but as The Flash and Captain Marvel 2 both showed, the movie's prospects could decay rather than improve, while, even if the faintness of the competition this year should seem a point in the movie's favor, it by no means guarantees its "cleaning up." The way the box office works these days the lack of appetizing alternatives on the menu does not mean that others will order up this one--and so for now the safest guess would seem to be the DCEU's last movie concluding the franchise's run with a whimper rather than a roar of triumph, with all that implies for the fantasy of a mighty new DCEU finally satisfying the WBD's longstanding Marvel envy, to say nothing of the superhero film, the franchise film, the blockbuster as we know it more broadly and the fate of a Hollywood which, battered by events beyond its control (like the pandemic, and the geopolitical turn hurting it in China) has also inflicted plenty of wounds on itself--while showing not the least sign of behaving more intelligently in the years ahead.
January 26, 2024
Aquaman 2 vs. Captain Marvel 2 at the Box Office
In a month of global release Aquaman 2 has collected almost $400 million at the worldwide box office.
Compared to the original film (which took in almost a billion dollars more in its run in inflation-adjusted terms), this is a disaster--a gross of less than one-third of what its predecessor made. Indeed, the neighborhood of $400 million was about what I estimated back in September when talking about a scenario of collapse for the Aquaman series.
However, there is no question that it is far superior to what that obvious point of comparison, Captain Marvel 2, managed in the same season--about twice as much in fact (Captain Marvel 2 having barely broken the $200 million barrier before hitting streaming). One may add that the Aquaman sequel did this in spite of having its own burden of unhelpful factors, like the equally long wait since the last film (five rather long years from the end of 2018 to the end of 2023), the fact that it was coming after not a comparative hit for its "cinematic universe" the way Captain Marvel 2 did (the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, if not all that might have been hoped for, still pulling in over $800 million just a half year before Marvel hit theaters) but the debacle that was the release of The Flash, and the weakness of its own promotional campaign, which gave many the impression that the studio was all but refusing to throw good money after bad.
Does this at all refute the claims of superhero fatigue and franchise fatigue? Absolutely not. In fact it confirms them when we consider just how badly one megabudgeted superhero epic after another flopped, especially from June forward, underlining how little the audience's showing up for them can be taken for granted now as compared with before the pandemic. Still, I am doubtful that those who make the decisions will heed the lessons. Rather I suspect that the studio bosses will seize on anything and everything that can seem to justify their "staying the course"--treating Aquaman 2 as a comparative success story for not doing as badly as Captain Marvel 2, even with so much against it (and play up the reception of Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and anything else they can think of), as grounds that they can still make this work--that all they need is better writers" and more "adult supervision" for directors, and all will be well--all as the onlookers well aware that they are just digging a bigger hole for themselves await their chance to once more tell them "I told you so."
February 2, 2024
How Did Aquaman 2 Play in China?
Back in 2018 a significant factor in the first Aquaman film's success was its exceptionally robust performance internationally, especially in China. Grossing just short of $292 million there, this made it the DCEU's sole billion-dollar success to date (and that when, five inflationary years earlier, a billion was worth quite a bit more than it is now).
Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.
This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)
The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.
* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.
How a Fixation on Teaching Formulas Undermines Student Writing
When teaching educators are often torn between emphasizing deeper instruction that will go a longer way to building skills, and emphasizing what is easily communicated, easily learned, easily tested for, rather than what is actually likely to prove really useful but which is less susceptible to quick and easy conveyance and testing. (This is all the more the case insofar as the instructor must deal with students who are working below the level they are supposed to be, the students have little or no interest in the course the instructor teaches, and the instructor and students must face the prevailing cult of punitive standardized testing gone mad.)
One result is an attraction to formulas, which are relatively easy to communicate, and memorize, and in some ways check for--but the successful application of which is a trickier matter that tends to get neglected in the fixation on formula, with particularly pointed consequences in a class like English composition, where the development of a skill is everything.
Consider the famous writing formula, the "three-prong thesis statement," in which one presents a thesis (the claim, analytical in nature, which their paper exists to argue for) with three supporting arguments in a single sentence, as shown in the following (admittedly banal) example:
However, when we look at the substance of the supporting claims we see that it is not really satisfying a three prong thesis statement. Rather we have one "prong" repeated three times in slightly different language, giving the impression that there are actually three different supporting claims when there is only one such claim.
A college education helps us get a better job. Very well. But then we are told that it helps us "find better employment." What do they mean by "better employment?" Well, they mean that you get a better job--so it is really the same thing over again.
Now the claim about having a "brighter future" may look different. But in what way does the college education lead to such a brighter future? While some will wax rhapsodic about the enlargement of the mind by education, etc., it is the benefits of the "better job" that they are most apt to have in mind. Thus, if less blatantly, the writer has repeated themselves again.
The result is that if they have superficially fulfilled the requirement of providing three supporting arguments for their position at that deeper level they have failed to do so--producing the appearance of three supporting arguments, rather than actually giving us three arguments.
Indeed, in their rigid, if superficial, adherence to the three prong formula they have produced a piece of writing which is worse than if they had cast the formula aside to give us one argument. Why? Because more important than any formula is what the formulas are supposed to do for those who know and use them--enable them to present an argument with economy and clarity, which is exactly what does not happen here.
A writer who does this violates the principle of "economy of expression" with their words when they give us the same argument three times over. They should say something once, as concisely as possible, and then move on.
Additionally, they make their writing confusing by promising us three supporting arguments, and then giving us the same thing over and over again in slightly different words. The whole reason for presenting a thesis statement early on in the fashion described above is to tell us in advance what we are getting. This has us expecting one thing--but they present something else. After all, where we expected a second, different, argument, or a third, we find ourselves with no more than we had before. Approaching their paper in good faith we may think that we missed something, so that we might pause and try to puzzle it out, or go back and reread it--taking up more of our time, and distracting us from the overall argument.
Frankly, it would have been far better if they wrote a thesis statement with just one prong ("Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job."), as that would at least have afforded greater focus and clarity. And I would tell my classes that in so many words. However, many students went on writing those "three-prong statements" anyway, the importance of the form having been drilled into them until it seemed more important than the actual content the structure was supposed to organize.
In pointing this out I am not denying the usefulness of formulas, just the insistence on teaching the formula without teaching skill in applying them to specific situations by forming a judgment for which no learnable quantity of heuristics can plausibly substitute, and in fact can only be used correctly by people who already have that judgment. In its absence the formulas just make their writing a worse mess than it would otherwise be for lack of that judgment to which the training should have accorded much more attention.
One result is an attraction to formulas, which are relatively easy to communicate, and memorize, and in some ways check for--but the successful application of which is a trickier matter that tends to get neglected in the fixation on formula, with particularly pointed consequences in a class like English composition, where the development of a skill is everything.
Consider the famous writing formula, the "three-prong thesis statement," in which one presents a thesis (the claim, analytical in nature, which their paper exists to argue for) with three supporting arguments in a single sentence, as shown in the following (admittedly banal) example:
Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job, find better employment, and have a brighter future.The central analytical claim--about the importance of a college education--certainly has three supporting claims backing it up. And on that level this sentence may seem to fulfill the expectation of a three prong thesis statement.
However, when we look at the substance of the supporting claims we see that it is not really satisfying a three prong thesis statement. Rather we have one "prong" repeated three times in slightly different language, giving the impression that there are actually three different supporting claims when there is only one such claim.
A college education helps us get a better job. Very well. But then we are told that it helps us "find better employment." What do they mean by "better employment?" Well, they mean that you get a better job--so it is really the same thing over again.
Now the claim about having a "brighter future" may look different. But in what way does the college education lead to such a brighter future? While some will wax rhapsodic about the enlargement of the mind by education, etc., it is the benefits of the "better job" that they are most apt to have in mind. Thus, if less blatantly, the writer has repeated themselves again.
The result is that if they have superficially fulfilled the requirement of providing three supporting arguments for their position at that deeper level they have failed to do so--producing the appearance of three supporting arguments, rather than actually giving us three arguments.
Indeed, in their rigid, if superficial, adherence to the three prong formula they have produced a piece of writing which is worse than if they had cast the formula aside to give us one argument. Why? Because more important than any formula is what the formulas are supposed to do for those who know and use them--enable them to present an argument with economy and clarity, which is exactly what does not happen here.
A writer who does this violates the principle of "economy of expression" with their words when they give us the same argument three times over. They should say something once, as concisely as possible, and then move on.
Additionally, they make their writing confusing by promising us three supporting arguments, and then giving us the same thing over and over again in slightly different words. The whole reason for presenting a thesis statement early on in the fashion described above is to tell us in advance what we are getting. This has us expecting one thing--but they present something else. After all, where we expected a second, different, argument, or a third, we find ourselves with no more than we had before. Approaching their paper in good faith we may think that we missed something, so that we might pause and try to puzzle it out, or go back and reread it--taking up more of our time, and distracting us from the overall argument.
Frankly, it would have been far better if they wrote a thesis statement with just one prong ("Getting a college education is important because it helps you get a better job."), as that would at least have afforded greater focus and clarity. And I would tell my classes that in so many words. However, many students went on writing those "three-prong statements" anyway, the importance of the form having been drilled into them until it seemed more important than the actual content the structure was supposed to organize.
In pointing this out I am not denying the usefulness of formulas, just the insistence on teaching the formula without teaching skill in applying them to specific situations by forming a judgment for which no learnable quantity of heuristics can plausibly substitute, and in fact can only be used correctly by people who already have that judgment. In its absence the formulas just make their writing a worse mess than it would otherwise be for lack of that judgment to which the training should have accorded much more attention.
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