Soap Opera as a Distinct Form of Storytelling

People often use the term "soap opera" to refer to a kind of storytelling, but it seems to me they rarely spell out what they mean in a clear, useful, way.

In trying to do better it may help to consider the fundamentals of "good," dramatic, conventional storytelling in the Western tradition going back to Aristotle and since developed by people like Gustav Freytag.*

From such storytelling we expect a story to be a "completed action." We expect a unity of "time, space and action." The result is that we expect that of the cast of characters one will clearly be protagonist; we expect that there will be a clear, main line of plot development; we expect the details to all matter (in line with the principle of "Chekhov's gun") as we proceed from exposition to rising action, climax, falling action, denouement--and beginning, middle and end.

This does not wholly exhaust the standard, but it is what is most important in it for explaining how the soap opera differs from it, because it lacks all these qualities. Rather than that completeness and unity of structure with its requirement of some measure of tightness of construction it is apt to be rather loose--a "loose baggy monster" if it goes on for long. Rather than having a clear protagonist it is about a bunch of people of whom one is unlikely to be, or remain for long, clearly more central than the rest. There may be a starting point--but there will not necessarily be an end, and hence no middle, because what the narrative does is follow those many people not through one big action, but an assortment of different, perhaps unrelated and nonsynchronous actions likely to involve some and not others one after the other (with, it might be added, many actions making little to no difference in their lives because the show must go on, so to speak); while if there is an end it is more likely to be a matter of the writer ceasing to follow those characters' doings (even if he comes up with an end point for them that makes their ceasing to do so look logical) than because some trajectory starting at the beginning has satisfyingly run its course by this point.

In short, soap opera is fundamentally different from conventional, unified, plot pyramided beginning-middle-end-type storytelling--with, I want to stress, the accent properly on different (as I have no interest in getting into the issue of "worse," "as good," "better" here).

As the reader may have guessed from this, while we call this storytelling mode "soap opera" this is only because soap opera (a term originated with radio shows) tends to work like this, not because soap opera invented this kind of narrative, which we are apt to find plenty of in nineteenth century novels, for example. (The term "loose, baggy monster" comes from Henry James' characterization of War and Peace, which I think can fairly be called a soap opera in the sense in which I use the term here--the more in as Tolstoy intended it to be just part of a far larger saga.) Moreover, if the kind of programming we associate the soap opera with, the daytime television soap opera, is one in deep decline these days amid the general revolutionizing of media in the digital age, this kind of storytelling is still fairly widespread--the more in as the looseness of the format is such a convenience for executives handling messy productions, eager to keep writers on a tight leash, and ever happy to spread out and drag out their tales with extra seasons and sprawling shared universes for as long as they remain profitable. Episodic television generally works that way--and so do the many movie franchises that, as they become more prolific, function more like TV shows than movies or movie series'. Indeed, the Marvel Cinematic Universe can be taken as a soap opera--while in Disney's hands there seem to have been notions of turning the storytelling of the Star Wars saga into a soap opera.

As all this makes clear, people do enjoy soap opera--but sometimes taking this approach proves very ill-advised indeed.

* Even if you've never heard of Freytag you probably know Freytag's explanation of plot structure (popularly known as "Freytag's pyramid").

Is the Hunger Games Prequel Actually the Hit of the Season?

Initially considering the prospects of the Hunger Games prequel I was pessimistic--expecting this to be another case of a formerly hugely successful franchise flopping with its latest film in the way we have already seen a great many times in 2023. The low estimates for the film's gross did not change that--and nor did the lackluster opening weekend gross (the $44 million it made domestically in its first three days not only a far cry from what the films of the original saga made, but at the low end of the range anticipated for this one). Still, the film had better-than-expected holds two weekends in a row, leaving it with $121 million grossed after its first seventeen days. This is, of course, much less than what the original The Hunger Games made in just its opening weekend (about just three-fifths of what it made in its opening three days if we adjust the figures for inflation), but it beats anything released since Five Nights at Freddy's (and seems likely to overtake Freddy's too before all is said and done). Moreover, with Wish underperforming very badly, Napoleon falling fast and the outlook for Aquaman 2 grim, all as the chances of anything proving a Super Mario Bros Movie, an Oppenheimer, a Barbie this holiday season seem very slim indeed, such that amid this very weak competition the prequel might well be the Victor of this season's Games.*

* The Hunger Games made $152 million in its opening weekend in March 2012--which amounts to $204 million in October 2023 prices, going by the Consumer Price Index.

Is Box Office Failure Getting Boring?

When back in early March box office-watchers were realizing that, after its sensational opening weekend, Ant-Man 3's ticket sales were going flat--and certainly not kicking off the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phrase Five with the hoped-for triumph--there seemed to be real surprise. There was less surprise when Fast and Furious 10 and Transformers 6 performed poorly by the standard of their franchises, because expectations were lower, but it added to the normalization of the failure of the kinds of films that until very recently tended to be considered nearly sure-fire successes, as did the opening weekend of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (even if this was partially compensated for by good legs), the letdown that was the release of the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, and, especially after its earlier insane hyping, the catastrophe that was the release of The Flash into theaters, as that very same weekend Elemental underperformed (its measure of redemption, too, coming a lot later and being limited in nature), and two weeks after that Indiana Jones 5, suffered (even considering the lowering of expectations after a poorly conceived worldwide premiere at Cannes) as bad a box office catastrophe as anything up to that point in the year. By their own more modest lights the superhero film Blue Beetle and The Expendables 4 franchise did just as badly.

By the time Captain Marvel 2 rolled around it seemed that no one was very hopeful for it--and the initial tracking-based estimates left less scope for disappointment, as you see rechecking the old figures. A month before release Boxoffice Pro told us that The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 would both finish well north of $200 million at worst, with the $350-$400 million range within reach, in just the domestic market. Alas, The Flash barely broke the $100 million barrier (pulling in less than it was supposed to make on just its opening weekend), while Indiana finished with under $175 million. By contrast Captain Marvel 2, expected to fall short of $200 million in even the best case scenario, and not outdo The Flash by much in the worst, had less way to fall--even as it did indeed fall lower than that ($100 million looking out of reach for the movie now). Meanwhile, as Disney's Wish proves a significant disappointment commercially (with the film's opening weekend again falling short of the low expectations for it, followed by a bad first-to-second weekend drop), and the prediction going that Aquaman 2 may not do much better than The Flash or The Marvels, it seems that the commentariat can scarcely work up a response. All that can be said has been said--even as the phenomenon continues, with every sign indicating that flops of this kind will continue in the same steady succession through 2024.

Of Robert Iger and "Unsupervised" Film Directors

Robert Iger, who seems scarcely able to open his mouth without disgracing himself, recently did so again with a silly statement about the lack of "supervision" on the set of The Marvels as the supposed cause of the film's failure.

It is another shabby instance of the old propaganda of the media business that the "creatives" are floopy-brained idiots who can produce nothing of value without the Practical People playing the strictest of strict parent to them--being, to use that awful cliché beloved by a certain kind of ideologue, the "adults in the room." (Consider, for instance, the lame script used to destroy the leading lights of the New Hollywood over and over again in succession. "Oh, they're a perfectionist!" "Oh, they can't stay within a budget!" "Oh, these artists and their visions!")

Just as before that propaganda has been dutifully, respectfully, passed on to the public by the entertainment press--because its members, "courtiers" by profession and indeed instinct, know that when they must choose from among those to whom they usually suck up, it is safest to go with the executives rather than the artistes. And the public believes them because, apart from usually believing what it is told, the prevailing schema of values has society respecting businesspersons infinitely more than artists. (It is one reason why artists, even when attaining great wealth as artists, seek renown as businessmen and businesswomen as well, pursuing such recognition like some latterday patent of nobility. "I'm not just an actor! I'm a businessperson!" Because I slapped my name on some crappy products.) It is all so pervasive that even people who ought to know better seem less cognizant of the pattern than they ought to be. (Thus did the usually very incisive Peter Biskind not call it out in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, all too often presenting much more conventional morality tales about talents ruined by their own hubris when recounting the shattering of those careers.)

It seems to me--and if I may so, a great many others--that the folks in Hollywood really in need of supervision--in need of adult supervision--are the ones who think that because they have big offices and wear expensive suits they are adults who know what they are doing, even as all they really seem to know how to do it is put holes in their company's balance sheets.

Wish's Opening Weekend: How Did it Do?

I wrote this after the first weekend but I was delayed in putting it up. Here it is anyway--with an update.

BoxOffice Pro projected for Wish a $35-$44 million gross over its first Friday-to-Sunday period--and $49-$66 million over the five-day Wednesday-to-Sunday period of the long Thanksgiving weekend.

As it happens the film made less than the bottom end of the range for the 3-day period over the whole five-day period--a mere $32 million (of which a bit under $20 million was collected over Friday, Saturday and Sunday). This is significantly below expectations that were already weak to begin with for a major Disney animated release (indeed, were weak for such a film even before being revised considerably downward this past month)--to say nothing of a movie that seems to have initially been conceived as a grand 100th anniversary event celebrating the founding of the historic studio.*

Of course, as I keep saying cinematic hits may be becoming less front-loaded, and we forget that at our peril. Certainly box office watchers were quicker than they ought to have been to write off both those Disney releases Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Elemental (both of which had better than expected holds, with Guardians in the end looking respectable, and Elemental going from flop to hit in the process), while this very weekend the Hunger Games prequel had a better than expected hold itself, indicating some hope for a movie that had also had a disappointing debut. The holiday season seems especially likely to work out this way for Disney releases. (Remember, even before the pandemic upended the film market, how things went for Mary Poppins Returns?) Of course, it will take quite the multiplier to make even the low end recently estimated for the whole-run gross possible--even quintupling the five-day gross does not get one much further than $150 million or so, beneath the bottom end of the range Boxoffice Pro anticipated for the movie a week before its release ($165 million). Still, it may be safest not to rush to the cry of "FLOP! FLOP! FLOP!" just yet.

* The expectation for the three-day period as of a month ago had been $45-$65 million, and $64-$94 million for the first five days in release.

UPDATE: Wish has had its second weekend which saw a 61 percent drop for the film from its unprepossessing opening, leaving it with a mere $42 million after ten days--less than the bottom end of the range for the first three days in the first Boxoffice Pro forecast. The result is that it will be tough for the movie to get to $100 million, never mind $165 million (or the near-$300 million previously treated as a serious possibility).

On the Routineness of Ex-Special Forces Protagonists in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

I recall running across a gripe session on a discussion board among people annoyed with the trope of a zombie apocalypse scenario where the hero just so happens to be ex-special forces.

There was more in the way of amusing cracks than genuine insights into the matter, but it still got me thinking about just why we see so much of this. One way of looking at the matter is to say that the reason there are so many such characters in these stories is that they are such natural protagonists for them--people trained for combat, survival in harsh conditions, etc. having skills that would be very useful indeed in such situations, and besides being helpful to them potentially helpful to any group of people they link up with.

But people sure have seen it a lot, so much so that it seems predictable, and "convenient," and trite.

That suggests another, larger, problem--namely that there has been so much writing in this genre for so long, so that like any genre that gets so deeply exploited for so long it is tired. The issue, then, seems less the kind of protagonist than the fact that people had seen this story so many times before.

And that in turn suggests a bigger problem still--that we are overdue for some new genres with which to amuse ourselves. Alas, pop culture is stuck in a rut—likely because everything else is too.

Social Withdrawal as Social Protest

Considering the issue of social withdrawal I have generally found myself looking at reports on the matter from or about Japan, and discussion of the issue as it may apply elsewhere in the English-speaking press (mainly though not exclusively the American press). Recently, though, I happened on an item in the French newspaper 20 Minutes discussing the topic, which caught my attention right away with the title: "Hikikomoris français: 'J’ai fui le monde car il était trop dur, trop brutal, trop insécurisant, trop injuste, trop dégoûtant.'" Translated the quotation, from one of the article's interview subjects, says "I fled the world because it was too hard, too brutal, too insecure, too unfair, too disgusting."

I have long tended to the view that there is something of this view of society in much of the social withdrawal we see (in regard to work, for example), be it the milder forms of withdrawal in which people may hold a job, etc. but do the absolute minimum to survive and keep aloof from other people at all other times, or the more severe forms we see, as with the hikikomori who refuses to even come out of their room and face their family--but the preference has long been to see it as a matter of individual pathology, etc.. However, here we have an explicit social criticism on the part of one of the sufferers, who flatly says that he found the world outside unbearable--a reaction hardly implausible given how society is structured, how people treat each other, and the rest, and especially how all this is felt at the "sharp end." The fact that the response to such criticisms so often tends to be sneering callousness ("Welcome to the real world!") only underlines the fact--and suggests that those seriously interested in where the world is going would do far better to put such phenomena in their proper context than, in line with the conventional, cowardly, mediocre norm people treat as mature and pragmatic, deny the existence of any context at all.

"I Never Rewrite!"

Read much about writers with any amount of attention and you will come across quite the number who claim that they never rewrite their own work.

Read their remarks with attention and you also note that, if true, this is because they can count on others to do it for them--because, frankly, they are prominent enough to be indulged that way.

The rest of us, alas, can only dream of ever enjoying anything like such privilege, leaving us enduring the process--and, unpleasant as it is, probably producing a better result for it a fair amount of the time.

Just What is an "'80s Jerk?"

I recall years ago happening on the Teen Titans, Go! episode "Nostalgia is Not a Substitute for an Actual Story." For the most part the episode was up to the standard of the show's very good best, but I was confused by the discussion of "'80s jerks" as a particular, distinctive, type.

That confusion did not prompt me to look into the matter--but more recently I found myself running across items that discussed '80s pop culture as featuring mean-spirited characters out to wreck the hero's effort to attain some goal, often without there being much practical gain in it for them, and wondered whether there was any substance to this at all.

Assuming that there is indeed such substance one possibility is that this truly standard storytelling element seems '80s because after the '80s the big movies that had a chance to make a significant pop cultural impression had less room for such jerks--because of the way big splashy action movies crowded out the littler comedies and light dramas where they tended to feature. Thus the bad guys were not mere jerks, but rather something grandiosely malevolent in very high-stakes situations (like a Thanos).

It may also be that as the "cult of the asshole" grew and grew the default level of "jerkiness" we came to take for granted meant that even where they could possibly have made an impression jerks of the old kind would scarcely be noticed--the more in as the hero themselves was now likely to qualify for "jerk" status themselves. (How else would you characterize Tony Stark, certainly in his Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnations? Or the more recent incarnations of Batman as Hollywood embraced the idea of "Batman as unhinged fascist?")

Considering all that, even granting that unlike some others I do not think film is exactly suffering from a lack of small-time villains motivated by petty or pointless meanness, it does seem to me that the way "jerk characters" have become less conspicuous reflects how film has become a good deal more limited than it used to be--all as the threshold for what constitutes insufferable behavior keeps rising.

Star Wars Was Not, and Could Never Have Been, Another MCU

The title of this post makes the point--Star Wars was not, and could never have been, the second Marvel Cinematic Universe-style hit machine that Disney was so clearly hoping for when it bought Lucasfilm. There are at least three reasons for that.

1. As one finds attending to George Lucas' creative process when he worked on the original Star Wars he was torn between making a more "adult" piece of science fiction, with complex world-building and political themes, and a fairy tale as he understood the form on the basis of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment. In the end he opted for the latter--and produced Star Wars as we know it. The catch, however, is that fairy tales are simple and short, with a beginning, middle, end, and expanding them is apt to turn them into something they are not--as is evident when we look at the Expanded Universe, even at its best. (A figure like Grand Admiral Thrawn, for example, has no place in a world of fairy tale simplicities.) It is evident, too, when we look at George Lucas' own prequel trilogy (1999-2005)--in which we see something of those more complex, world-building-intensive, political ideas Lucas had but eschewed when working on the first film in the '70s. The Expanded Universe has been a success with a limited hard core of readers; the prequels alienated many. So was it likely to go with any other such effort--with, as Disney demonstrated, stretching out the Star Wars' saga's main line by three more movies leaving fans looking at it and saying "This is not my Star Wars" (and not just because of the culture war politics, even if that is what gets all the press).

2. As might be guessed from that fairy tale origin Star Wars was never a creation comparable to the Marvel or DC comic book universes--really a bunch of separate comic book characters, separate stories that over time got to be complexly interlinked into a sprawling narrative. Putting it another way the core of those universes that people attend to are those characters, each the stars of their own show, so to speak, the heroes of their own stories, who happen to live in the same world as those other stars and heroes so that they get involved in each others' lives. By contrast Star Wars was the "hero's journey" of Luke Skywalker--and if members of his supporting cast struck a chord with many fans (a Han Solo, a Lando Calrizian, a Boba Fett) they did not provide the same basis for setting up Iron Man and Thor and Captain America in their own movies, and then tying them together in the Avengers. Thus a Han Solo movie was the kind of thing more likely to appeal to Expanded Universe readers than the general audience--as was seen when that movie actually came out. It did not have to be a debacle--but the level of investment in it, reflecting the unreasonable expectations for the general-audience interest in such a movie, made it so.

3. Besides the fact that Star Wars did not provide a superhero comic universe-retinue of characters each plausibly the star of their own film, there was the significant liability of the world they inhabited. One of the principal attractions of the superhero genre as against other forms of sci-fi action spectacle--most evident in the most consistently high-performing franchises, like Batman and Spider-Man, as against the more exotic franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy--is that superheroes operate in something like the real world, presenting the audience with a minimum of what Darko Suvin would have called "alienation" effects (things that yank them out of the experience, not least by forcing them to think). We all know Gotham is basically New York--while Spider-Man actually does live in New York--and it is easier for the general audience to get into that than the story of someone on Coruscant. Alas, making a Cinematic Universe out of Star Wars required the audience to not just be willing to follow the adventures of someone on Coruscant, but to be specifically interested in that fictional world in itself. Again, the hardcore fans are happy to immerse themselves in that galaxy far, far away. But they are no basis for consistent billion-dollar hits (as, again, the results show).

The basis of all of this seems to me to have been fairly obvious stuff to anyone who bothered to understand Star Wars, and the cinematic market, and for that matter bothered to learn a little bit about how science fiction works. (Certainly something of this would have been obvious had they read a certain book I can name. Ahem.) But I have no idea if anyone at Disney-Lucasfilm understood it, while it seems obvious that if they did understand it they regarded it as far less important than the Star Wars brand name, which was what they paid those billions for and on which they bet so heavily, with this admittedly seeming to work out for a while Episode VII was a sensational success, financially at least (making a billion in profit by itself, according to the folks at Deadline).

But things fell apart fairly quickly, so much so that Kathleen Kennedy recently spoke of Star Wars being handled not like the MCU but the much-lower output Bond movies (read: rather than three billion-dollar movies a year, one movie that will probably fall short of a billion every three years). While the press does not seem to have made much of it this is a confession of the effort's defeat--catastrophic, war-losing defeat--which can seem the greater given how 007 himself has not been doing so well lately, with the same going for Disney's other revenue streams.

The Superhero Flops Pile Up--as the Musical Flops Did a Half Century Ago

Looking at the superhero films of this year one may note that Ant-Man 3 underperformed, but the domestic drop was actually mild (about a sixth from the prior film's gross)--the bigger factors in perceptions of the film's performance the very front-loaded holiday weekend and the exaggerated expectations for what making it the start of Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) would do to boost the film relative to the prior Ant-Mans; and where the more serious shortfall in the international gross was at issue, the way the film fell flat in China (where Marvel generally, and Ant-Man 2 specifically, had done well). Shazam 2 really did do badly, but was also a relatively limited follow-up to an at best minor success, and so chancy from the start, with the same going for Blue Beetle--an originally straight-to-streaming project upgraded to theatrical release that failed to justify the gamble (commercially, anyway, even if there did seem to be some genuine liking for the film among those who bothered to show). Additionally Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if it opened disappointingly (by the standards of $100 million+ openers, at any rate), had the benefit of good holds that in the end will probably leave it, if a confirmation of the MCU's trend toward declining grosses, still one of the year's more profitable films.

The result is that looking at those movies one can see room for argument about how superhero films are doing. By contrast The Flash was an undeniable catastrophe, with this major, height of summer-released DCEU film about a core Justice League member performing in a way that would have been troubling even for a Shazam film--this movie that cost $300 million taking in under $300 million globally.

Now Captain Marvel 2, as of its third weekend in release, looks as if it will end up doing worse. And the first tracking data-based forecast from Boxoffice Pro for Aquaman 2 suggests the film will do no better than those two predecessors.

Considering the prospect of these three massive superhero films becoming flops on a historic scale (each perhaps registering a loss in the $100 million+ range, and perhaps much more) in just a little over six months' time puts me in mind of 1969--the year when the underperformance of three big-budget musicals (Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, Hello Dolly!) proved a turning point for Hollywood, ending its fantasy of having another Sound of Music-level success. Musicals still got made, but they were no longer the mainstay of the box office they once had been--and in spite of scoring hits once a while, never truly recovered.

Again, Hollywood does not turn on a dime, the release schedule typically lagging the decision to greenlight a movie by a couple of years (more than that these days, with all the pandemic and strike-related disruptions), such that more superhero movies will be coming our way because the project is already in production, pre-production or otherwise underway; while as yet I have seen no evidence that Disney or the WBD are at all capable of shifting tracks. Quite the contrary, troubled as the MCU is it may actually be Disney's strongest earner these days (with Star Wars all but moribund, with any schemes it had for Indiana Jones fallen flat, with its animated productions doing so badly that the commercially marginal Elemental is its closest thing to a success since before the pandemic); while the WBD would seem to have little to keep it going but the fantasy that an overhauled DCEU will let it beat Disney-Marvel at its own game. Still, supertanker-slow as shifting a studio might be, and stubborn and stupid as the studios' management may be, the studios, already very badly battered at this point (by overinvestment in streaming, by the pandemic, by rising interest rates, etc.), can only take so much more in the way of losses--and eventually they will have to change their current course, however hard it may be to picture that change, or the result's appearance.

Napoleon's Opening Weekend

Last month I speculated about whether Ridley Scott's Napoleon had the makings of another Oppenheimer--as another historical biopic that looks like unpromising material for a hit which surprises us all with a box office triumph. I was doubtful (Oppenheimer having had advantages in the form of Christopher Nolan's cheering section and the claims for its relevance based on the hyping of supposedly transformative breakthroughs in artificial intelligence). Going by the initial projection, and the tracking data-based estimates that Boxoffice Pro put out over the month I saw no reason to revise that opinion, while looking at the numbers this weekend it seems that the movie's actual gross has, domestically at least, almost exactly matched Boxoffice Pro's pre-weekend projection (a bit over $20 million for the 3-day period, $32 million for the 5-day period).

Still, how the film's legs hold up remains to be seen. They would seem most unlikely to carry it anywhere near the billion-dollar mark given this start, but it is possible that if the holds are decent, or the film simply enjoys a robust response in the international market that has long been more receptive toward movies like this one than the domestic one (indeed, the film has already picked up $46 million abroad, a figure apparently considered a pleasant surprise by some observers), it might at least cover its costs--which these days seems like a feat for any movie, and still more for a Scott-directed historical epic such as this.

Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes: Second Weekend Box Office Gross

A month before release the expectations for the Hunger Games prequel (Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) were low--dismal, even--next to the grosses of the four films of the original saga, and if Boxoffice Pro's projections edged upward from there they were still a far cry from the surges seen for Oppenheimer and Barbie (the high end of the range for which shot up from a bit above $200 million to almost twice that much). And then when the film did come out last weekend its gross was nearer the low end of the range than the high, a mere $44 million at the domestic box office.

Of course, as I have said in the past, it may be that even franchise films which succeed are less front-loaded than they used to be, with audiences more hesitant to go to theaters than before the pandemic--more skeptical of the idea that they have to go and see this sequel/prequel/reboot/remake "just because it's there," instead waiting to hear that the film is actually worth their time from others, preferably others they know instead of ever-ready-for-hire claqueurs of the entertainment media. (Thus would it seem to have gone with Guardians of the Galaxy 3, for example.) So I thought I would wait and see what the second, holiday, weekend had in store for the movie.

As it happens, the Hunger Games prequel would seem to have held up a bit better than expected this weekend--the movie pulling in $28 million over the three-day Friday-to-Sunday period and $41 million over the five-day Wednesday-to-Sunday period, lifting the total domestic gross to $97 million (against the $82 million Boxoffice Pro projected on the basis of its expectation of a steeper drop). This is far from enough to make it a blockbuster on the scale of its predecessors--but, should its legs hold up the movie may at least eke out a domestic gross north of $150 million on that basis, at least keeping it from being a major money-loser, and maybe better than that on the basis of a healthy international response (which is certainly better than a good many anticipated for it).

Captain Marvel 2's Third Weekend Box Office Gross

Last week Boxoffice Pro predicted a relatively gentle drop in Captain Marvel 2's weekend gross after the collapse seen in the movie's second weekend--anticipating its taking in a bit over $6 million to raise its North American total to $77 million after seventeen days in relase.

As it happened, the unprepossessing prediction proved accurate. The result is that, if the film's chances of defying all it has against it (a divisive reaction to the first film, the Marvel Cinematic Universe's trend of declining grosses, the declining interest in superhero films and franchise films generally, the weak promotional campaign, the uncertain response to the Ms. Marvel show with which it is so strongly tied in, the bad buzz-encouraging delay and leaks about its budget, and eventually the lackluster reviews) to be a great commercial success were probably slight from the start, the chances of Captain Marvel 2 now going from flop to hit Elemental-style now seem negligible.*

Indeed, given how badly it is lagging the earlier film (with not quite $77 million grossed after seventeen days, when Captain Marvel 2 was just short of the $100 million mark) I no longer see any reason to expect Captain Marvel 2 to beat The Flash domestically, or globally either. What interests me now is whether the movie will manage to beat Aquaman 2 to escape the dishonorable distinction of being the lowest-grossing of the really big superhero releases of the year--a race that, given Aquaman 2's weak current prospects, Captain Marvel 2 might not necessarily lose.**

* The only real rival to The Flash here would be Indiana Jones 5.
** I count as the major releases the top-tier Marvel and DCEU movies--besides the three named here, Ant-Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy 3. (By contrast Shazam 2 and Blue Beetle, both of which Captain Marvel 2 has admittedly beat, would be lower-tier films.)

Will Any Movie Open Above $50 Million This Season?

Captain Marvel 2, reportedly the season's most anticipated film, opened earlier this month to just $47 million domestically--and then proved to have been very front-loaded indeed (falling 78 percent in its second weekend). The Hunger Games prequel, Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, in spite of some comparative optimism about its prospects, opened to a little less, while Boxoffice Pro projected an opening of $25-$35 million for Wonka, and $50 million is likewise well ahead of what either of this week's big releases, Napoleon or Wish, is expected to make in its first three days (even if Wish might get past that over the fuller five day weekend).

All of this seemed to leave Aquaman 2 (coming out Christmas week) Hollywood's last shot at a really big hit this season--but we have just learned that $50 million is well above even the high end of the range projected for its opening by the folks at Boxoffice Pro. The result is that I have no expectation of any movie opening before New Year's Day debuting to that much--and this holiday season, just like the first half of the summer season, coming off looking week next to their counterparts in 2022, underlining just how far Hollywood still remains from its pre-pandemic performance--all as 2024, with a release slate much like 2023's but weakened by the disruption of the year's strikes, promises the box office little relief.

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.

Captain Marvel 2 is Actually Doing Worse Than The Flash

Initially considering Captain Marvel 2 I treated it as a regular Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) release in a time of declining prospects for Marvel (with its sequels making 20-50 percent less than their predecessors in the same series), and calculated on that basis a likely gross of $600-$700 million for the film back in May. Many franchise flops and a disappointing promotional campaign later I suggested the movie would be the Marvel Cinematic Universe's equivalent of the debacle that The Flash has been for the DC Extended Universe (DCEU), with, of course, this promptly affirmed by the tracking data-based projections from the folks at Boxoffice Pro.

So far, however, Captain Marvel 2 has actually done worse than The Flash. The Flash had a bigger opening weekend ($55 million to Captain Marvel 2's $47 million five months later), and had a better first-to-second weekend hold (falling just 73 percent, as against 78 percent in Captain Marvel 2's case) that left it with one-third more money grossed ten days into its run ($88 million to Captain Marvel 2's $65 million). Moreover, Thanksgiving weekend is not expected to narrow the gap by much. Even with Boxoffice Pro anticipating a relatively mild second-to-third weekend drop of 33 percent for The Marvels, this still works out to $77 million for Captain Marvel 2 on Sunday, against the $99 million The Flash had at the same point in its run. That enabled The Flash to break the $100 million barrier the next day--whereas that barrier seems likely to remain well outside Captain Marvel 2's reach.

Moreover, the numbers are only part of the story. In comparing the two films it is worth noting that given the state of the DCEU the release of The Flash was, from the franchise standpoint, comparable to the airing of the last episodes of a TV series canceled for low ratings after being given many, many chances to do better--in contrast with a Marvel Cinematic Universe that, if far from its Phase Three peak, recently looked as robust as any franchise around, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3's reception, if not all that could have been hoped for, implying some life still left in it (the weak opening weekend compensated for by good holds suggestive of a real measure of welcome), and even raising hopes that a bit of the associated good will would translate over to the next MCU release. One may add that Captain Marvel 2 did not suffer anything like the scandal that hung over The Flash on account of the personal life of its star. The result is that its weaker performance occurred without quite so many of the liabilities that The Flash bore, bespeaking the public's either becoming much more sour on the kind of film this is in the past few months, a much stronger rejection of this particular movie on the basis of the kind of movie it seems to be (the goofier approach, etc.), or both.

Captain Marvel 2 Flies into its Third Weekend

With Napoleon and Wish coming out these are naturally the focus of the commentary of box office-watchers--but let us also not forget the major releases of prior weeks, like Captain Marvel 2. Thus far underperforming very, very badly (with a mere $65 million taken in its first ten days it was running about one-fourth behind The Flash and tending to slip) one may wonder if the holiday weekend will not provide the film some relief.*

As it happens, Boxoffice Pro projects the movie collecting another $12 million over the week, likely helped by the holiday weekend.

Of course, past projections for the film have proven overoptimistic (as with last weekend's)--and so could this one. Yet the fact remains that the film does not have much way to fall, while the competition this weekend (given what we are hearing about the expectations for Napoleon and Wish, and holdovers like the Hunger Games prequel and Trolls 3) does not seem overwhelming. Rather the problem is that the film could do a good deal better than that and still have a very long way to go before rising above the "flop" status the press has accorded it.

* At the same point in its run The Flash, which had opened bigger and had a better first-to-second weekend hold had $88 million grossed domestically (one-third more than Captain Marvel 2).

Wish Hits Theaters: What Can We Expect?

This Thanksgiving weekend sees two big new movies hitting theaters. One is Ridley Scott's Napoleon. The other is Disney's Wish.

An "event" film marking the 100th anniversary of the Disney studio and its tradition of animated filmmaking, one might ordinarily expect the film to be a massive hit--but the picture we got a month ago was more ambiguous. And the range has slipped. Where even a week ago Boxoffice Pro suggested a range of $40-$60 million for the 3-day weekend, and $57-$87 million for the 5-day, now their range has $44 million as good as it gets for the 3-day period ($35-44 million), $66 million as good as it gets for the 5-day ($49-$66 million). The floor has not dropped much, but the ceiling has, with all that implies for the prospects of a near-$300 million gross that Boxoffice Pro has raised, and continued to entertain in its longer-range estimates down to last week. Good holds might partially compensate for this, but these are of course no sure thing--the more in as the critics have not been kind to this one. (Their score on Rotten Tomatoes is just 51 percent.)

Still, it is now the audience's turn to judge the movie for itself, and we will see what they decide in the weeks ahead.

"Can Napoleon Be Another Oppenheimer?": A Follow-Up

As I remarked in a post last month seeing the ads for Napoleon I found myself thinking of Oppenheimer--both films being biographical epics about major historical figures, a genre not known to do too well at the American box office. Oppenheimer surprised everyone on that score--and I wondered whether Napoleon might not do the same.

I saw two reasons to doubt it right away--namely that whereas Napoleon helmer Ridley Scott is a respected, veteran, director, he has no cheering section out there ready to praise to the skies anything he does the way Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan does, which probably did a lot to help sell the movie; while if the story of Napoleon and the events of his time have undeniable meaning for the world today, there seemed little playing up of any such "relevance" in the media next to the way they compared the advent of the nuclear age to the unhinged hyping of text-spitting chatbots when talking about Nolan's film.

As it happened, the Boxoffice Pro projections for the movie, in spite of fluctuations over the past month, remain pretty much where they were four weeks ago (with a 3-day opening in the vicinity of $16-$21 merely risen to one of $17-$23 million, and even the high end of the range projected for the film's overall run still in the $70-$80 million range). Meanwhile critics are not exactly gushing about the movie, the film's Rotten Tomatoes score a mere 68 percent. By contrast the projection for Oppenheimer, reflecting the tracking data, surged some 30 percent in the month before release, from $40-$55 million to $52-$72 million in the opening weekend alone--a feat the more impressive because it came out the same weekend as the even more performing #1 hit of the year, Barbie--while critical enthusiasm was such as to produce a 93 percent score (with some of that praise won in surprising places, I might add).

Of course, with the film only coming out now it has some room to surprise us--but that room is dwindling fast, domestically at least. (The international markets, traditionally more receptive to historical films like this one, may be another matter.)

Captain Marvel 2's Second Weekend in North American Release: How Did it Go?

Back in May I speculated that The Marvels, based on the emergent pattern of Marvel Cinematic Universe sequels each making 20 to 50 percent less in real terms than the preceding film in their series (and the particularly close parallel with Black Panther 2), would gross some $600-$700 million global. After a summer of shocking franchise flops that could not simply be blamed on anything but audience disinterest (given how well other movies like Barbie were doing in the same season), and the poor impression that the film's pre-release publicity seemed to be making on the public, this seemed like it could be optimistic--and in early October the tracking data confirmed it. On the basis of that added information I revised my estimate for the global gross down to $250-$500 million--and then after another month of signs pointing to an even weaker performance than had seemed likely in early October, ended up wondering if even $250 million would not be overoptimistic, with this possibility hardly seeming less plausible after the actual opening weekend (which saw it take in just $47 million in North America).

Of course, I did suggest that hit movies, even when they were big movies like this one, may have been growing less front-loaded than before, and that good holds might partially compensate for the film's weak opening (as they did for the last MCU movie Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and even more for that flop-turned-hit Elemental). Alas, the expectations for the second weekend were a far cry from that (Boxoffice Pro projecting a hard 65 percent drop, versus the 48 percent decline Guardians had) while the reality seems to have been worse--a fall of 78 percent, leaving the film with just $10 million grossed this weekend and $65 million in total.

By contrast even The Flash had not just opened bigger, but had a better first-to-second weekend hold ($55 million versus Captain Marvel 2's $47 million on the opening weekend, and a 73 percent), leaving it one-third ahead at the same point in its run (with just under $88 million after ten days, as against Captain Marvel 2's $65 million).

The Flash, of course, failed even to double its opening weekend gross, on the way to barely breaking past the $100 million mark domestically ($108 million). Captain Marvel 2, opening weaker and fading faster, would seem set to do worse, and thus fall short of the $100 million mark--and maybe even below the low end of the much-reduced domestic range I suggested earlier ($85-$125 million, versus the $100 million I thought was as low as it could go back in early October).

Of course, we do have a holiday weekend coming up--and again, the competition over the weeks ahead does not exactly look fierce. (The Hunger Games sequel opened this weekend to even less than Captain Marvel 2 had last week, just $44 million, near the bottom of the range predicted for it.) Still, even if I think it safest to watch how the film does next weekend before writing it off as a failure, it is undeniable that its chances of overcoming the weak opener, probably always slight to begin with, just keep on getting slighter.

"I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"

There are times when the entertainment media seems to represent movies as bigger successes than they are--grading box office performance on a curve.

This does not seem to have been the case with Captain Marvel 2, the press--which had loudly anticipated a flop before the film's release--calling the film a flop after that first weekend in release (and still more, the second).

However, those "analyses" of the film's performance I have encountered seem to be doing so as part of a particular game--emphasizing that yes, this particular superhero movie is a flop, but one should not draw any wider conclusions from that. Chalk this one up as a misfire suggestive of nothing more than slightly better management over at Marvel could easily fix--not superhero fatigue.

Yet consider the undeniable pattern since the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)'s Phase Three wrapped up back in 2019. Of the MCU movies released since only one really went "above and beyond" at the box office--Spider-Man in December 2021. Of course, one could reasonably chalk up the lackluster performance of its three predecessors (Black Widow, Eternals, Shang-Chi) to the effect of the pandemic and the associated experimentation with streaming (and at the global level, Marvel's shutout from the Chinese market, even if in fairness Marvel should have understood what it was getting into there), but it was also the case that Dr. Strange 2 looked like an underperformer given how well the Spider-Man film it was tied in with had just done, and the fainter than usual competition that season. And everything since has been unambiguously less successful, with the four next MCU sequels (Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Ant-Man 3, Guardians of the Galaxy 3), when the grosses are adjusted for inflation, down 20 to 50 percent from the grosses of the preceding films in their series'. Now Captain Marvel 2 seems almost certain to do worse than that. (Going by my estimates its gross could end up 80 percent down from what the first Captain Marvel made.)

And of course, what has been bad for the MCU has been worse for its principal rival, the DC Extended Universe, which saw Black Adam get a weak reception (failing to crack $400 million global), Shazam 2 make the third-stringer performance of the first Shazam look like boffo b.o. by comparison, and The Flash . . . well, it was pretty shocking back in June, though now we are used to such performances.

This seems to me like a pretty consistent pattern of weak performances by such films--the more in as, in contrast with the 2020-2021 period other movies are becoming really vast successes (as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie did, for example).

Considering all that my only objection to talk of superhero fatigue is that it understates the problem when we look at a year in which along with the declining grosses of the superhero films Fast and Furious, Transformers, Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible also suffered. Superhero fatigue is really a subset of a wider franchise fatigue and action movie fatigue and blockbuster fatigue, which fatigue for the moment shows no sign of abating--while being a thing Hollywood, and the claqueurs of the entertainment press, can still less afford to admit given how much more deeply threatening it is to the model by which they have made so much money for so long, and for which the increasingly battered studios have absolutely no substitute at hand as they try to keep themselves afloat.

Do Computer Programmers (and Programming) Get Disproportionate Attention in Discussion of the Labor Market?

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in May 2022 the U.S. had some 133,000 computer programmers at work.

This is out of some 158.3 million employed people that very month--which means that computer programmers comprise a mere 0.084 percent of total American employment, fewer than one in eleven hundred of those persons employed in this country actually a "computer programmer."

One would never guess that from the sheer amount of time spent talking about coders and coding.

Of course, computer programmers are just one of a wider range of jobs in the computer field (with some of which programmers may be synonymous in the minds of those not too meticulous in their use of the terminology). Still, as the BLS statistics show, the full range of computer science-related jobs comes to some 5 million nationally--with this, again, working out to not much more than 3 percent of the work force.

Again it is a rather smaller proportion of the work force than one would suppose from the time spent gabbing about them, to say nothing of such fashionable nonsense as coding being the "new literacy"--or the notion that people losing their other jobs could, in line with the inane sneer of the conventional wisdom-abiding, simply "learn to code," precisely because it is inconceivable that there would be enough work to go around for all of them even if they all excelled at it, with the category of "truck driver" exemplary. We have over 3.2 million drivers of light, heavy and tractor-trailer trucks--which is to say 24 times as many truck drivers as we do coders, and some three-fifths as many truck drivers as we do people employed across the whole computer field (again, something we would never guess from how people conventionally discuss these matters).

All of this is before we get to the matter of whether or not coding is itself going into decline as a profession in the wake of advances in artificial intelligence, as suggested by one working programmer whose remarks I read this week. As is so often the case with the essays in his increasingly unfortunate chosen forum (sufficiently unfortunate that it seems to me undeserving of a link that would bring it more readers) he meanders quite a bit and never really makes a point worth making, and subjects the reader to a great many stupid conventionalities as he does so (like the whole coding as the new literacy idiocy). All the same, it does provide some interesting anecdotal evidence of the new chatbots increasingly taking over the task, in large part because they are increasingly able to outdo humans at this very practical function the way they have recently outdone them at functions that were less necessary to the "structures of everyday life" (as with mastery of games like chess and Go).

Taking such claims at face value it seems to me that, while it is not inconceivable that more people will be involved in software development in one way or another, those who actually code as we have known it--and do so as trained, paid, full-time professionals--will probably become fewer rather than more numerous within the years ahead, making the disconnect between the occupational realities and the media-promulgated perceptions about coders discussed here even wider than it is now.

Captain Marvel 2: Looking Ahead to the Second Weekend

We now have some perspective on the opening weekend of The Marvels; some sense of how its second weekend is likely to go; and the reaction to all of the same.

Right now much is being made of not only how the movie's opening compares to that of the original Captain Marvel ($47 million versus the $153 million the first made, and just a quarter of the $186 million to which that gross would be equivalent now), but how it has had a weaker opening than any of the prior thirty-two Marvel Cinematic Universe films released to date in current dollar figures, including 2008's The Incredible Hulk fifteen inflationary years earlier (that movie made $55 million, which is more like $78 million today after adjustment for price rises), and long before the MCU became a brand--and all this accomplished by a non-sequel centered on a CGI-based character who had already proven hard to set up as the lead of his own movie (such that the MCU has not repeated the feat since), in contrast with the kind of hit the first Captain Marvel was.* Moreover, there seems little expectation of Captain Marvel 2 being saved by a leggy run, Boxoffice Pro projecting a 65 percent drop from the first weekend to the second to give it a second weekend take of $16 million, leaving the movie with only a bit over $71 million after ten days in release.

By comparison The Flash had almost $88 million collected at the same point in its run.

Should the film's grosses, falling from a lower level to start (The Flash opened bigger), continue to decay at that rate for any length of time the movie could be expected to finish out with a run well below that of The Flash ($108 million), and indeed below the long-depreciated $100 million mark.** (Just consider the opening weekend multiplier for the June release--1.97. Applied to Captain Marvel 2 it leaves one with just $92 million, near the low end of the range I suggested right before opening weekend.)

Meanwhile it has been noted that the overseas markets seem unlikely to come to the rescue, with these accounting for 57 percent of the gross to date, and China especially weak--the movie opening to under $12 million there, versus the $89 million it managed in 2019 (which constitutes an 89 percent drop in opening weekend gross in real terms). And while I have not seen any estimates of the international gross in the film's second weekend, I have no expectation of their being any better than those projected for North America.

If this movie is going to turn things around the way Elemental did (a possibility I thought slight but still worth raising) it will either be very soon or not at all.

* I refer, of course, to the reception to 2003's Hulk.
** The Flash opened to $55 million in its first three days--17 percent higher than Captain Marvel 2's opening.

Captain Marvel 2's Opening Weekend: The Numbers Are In (and They're Not Pretty)

As of late Sunday (by which time, most of the period has passed and few surprises remain on these matters) Captain Marvel 2 was expected to take in $47 million on opening weekend--not the lowest figure predicted for it, but safely within the range Boxoffice Pro predicted before the weekend ($35-$49 million).

At least as of this point the film has not defied the expectations for it--and indeed the media is pretty gloomy about the movie (even as the claqueurs, being claqueurs, fall all over themselves declaring "I don't wanna hear about no superhero fatigue!"). Still, while it is almost impossible to picture this movie getting anywhere near the gross of the billion-dollar hit that was the original, as I have said before even relative successes are less front-loaded than they used to be--the possibility existing that decent legs will at least partially compensate for a weak initial reception. Indeed, while everything would pretty much have to go right for the movie after this point (the way they did for Elemental) for this to happen, it is not wholly out of the question that the movie will grind its way somewhere near the break-even point I previously suggested might be in the vicinity of $600 million.

The result is that how things go in the next two weeks will be worth watching for anyone following this story--while there may be some hope for the movie in the 84 percent Audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, and the relatively weak competition the movie can be expected to have through the coming holiday season.

Disney Has Shaken Up its Release Schedule. What Will it Mean for the MCU?

Just recently the expectation had been that three Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) would be coming out in 2024--Deadpool 3, Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts, with at least one of them snagging that first weekend in May that for decades has been monopolized by the MCU. (Originally it was supposed to be Captain America 4, but then they said it would be Deadpool 3, and then because the movie was not actually finished some said Captain America 4 again.)

According to Variety there will only be one--coming out in the next fourteen months--Deadpool 3, hitting theaters on that last July weekend before the traditional dump month of August (the same weekend Captain Marvel 2 was originally supposed to release on this year). Meanwhile Captain America 4 has been bumped to February 2025 and The Thunderbolts to that last weekend of July 2025.

Some of this is an unavoidable function of the delays imposed on these productions by the recent strikes. Still, one may wonder if, given the way the MCU has been doing lately--and the way that Captain Marvel 2 seems set to become a flop of historic, The Flash-like proportions, Disney-Marvel is not finding it in its interest to give the brand a breather and try to rebuild some good will with audiences. One can see the decision not to push back Captain America 4 to May 2024 but instead still have a belatedly released Deadpool 3 be the next movie as consistent with that logic. As Deadpool was originally not part the MCU franchise (it was spun off from FOX's X-Men films), and looks and feels different from the other films (in its R-rated "edginess," its having what Peter Biskind called the "first alt-right superhero"), many who are less than happy with the recent MCU films may still be enthusiastic about a new Deadpool movie, while the MCU's runners may hope that any good will that movie earns the franchise will carry over to the next MCU films--all as any disappointment with which Captain Marvel 2 becomes associated fades in the public's memory in at least some degree. Assuming I am right about this I think this is a very limited strategy--but admittedly the runners of the MCU, just like the rest of Hollywood, do not exactly have a lot of great options at this stage of the game.

Was an Expectation of a $250 Million Worldwide Gross Overoptimistic for Captain Marvel 2?

Back in May I estimated on the basis of the performance of prior Marvel Cinematic Universe films (and especially what seemed to me the closest point of comparison, Black Panther 2) that Captain Marvel 2 (The Marvels) would in real terms make half what the original did--some $600-$700 million globally.

However, the way big franchise films just like this one kept flopping over the summer had me increasingly considering (as I had, correctly, with Indiana Jones 5) the possibility of a Solo-like collapse for the MCU franchise with this movie. And when I saw Boxoffice Pro's first publicly released tracking-based estimates that was what seemed to have come to pass, such that I downgraded my estimate to the $250-$500 million range a month ago.

Of course, expectations for the film have only continued to erode since (with a $50-$75 million opening weekend now thought too high, the last estimate in the $35-$49 million range), and on that basis I recently broached the possibility that the film would fail to make even $100 million in the North American, domestic, market--doing even less well than the DCEU's The Flash. Should that nightmare scenario come to pass for the film it is possible that, should the domestic/international split for the film be the same as it was for the original Captain Marvel); or the foreign gross erode even more heavily in an era in which Chinese moviegoers will not be buying $150 million in tickets the way they did last time; the film's gross could easily fall short of the $250 million mark globally.

In other words, the movie will have grossed--not netted, grossed--less than the outlay for just the production, with the result a flop that even by this year's standards could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Still, as audiences are just now starting to see the film there remains the possibility that this movie, like so many others this year, will manage to surprise the box office-watchers--with, as I suggested in an earlier post, audiences liking what they see, and good legs partly redeeming a weak opening to make what (as with Elemental) looked like a sure flop a hit instead. For what it is worth it seems that audiences right now are being kinder to the film than the critics (even the "All Audience" score on Rotten Tomatoes 73 percent, against the 61 percent score the critics provided), but one way or the other we will probably have a pretty good idea of which way things will tend not much later than Thanksgiving weekend.

Writing, Editing and the "80/20 Rule"

Not long ago I remarked the rather miserable quality of the advice that we tend to get about writing and editing. Indeed, it seems to me that when it comes to editing we can often find better advice--even about editing prose--just looking at discussion of software editing.

Why is that? I suppose that it is that people generally don't think much of writing as a practical activity where "time is money" and deadlines press (even though they do for professional writers), but that they do think in such terms when considering software writing, and so discuss the matter more seriously.

The particular bit of this that I have in mind is the Pareto principle-derived "80/20 rule"--or rather, one particular form of it, holding that 80 percent of a software engineering team's effort on a project will have to do with just 20 percent of the piece of software, an extreme disproportion (the team putting in 16 times as much work, relatively speaking, on that part as the whole rest of the thing). In at least a broad way this principle seems to me to apply to work on prose as well, limited portions of a text likewise likely to suck up an extremely disproportionate share of the time and effort.

I might add that this becomes clearer in hindsight than in advance as those doing the work find themselves going over that bit again and again and again to get it right, or as close to right as they can, with even those who know that this kind of thing happens unpleasantly surprised when it does happen in a particular place and time (the more in as they may have hoped to get lucky and avoid it). The fact plays its part in so often making the start of a writing project a much more enjoyable thing than its end (how, as Winston Churchill put it, a book is a plaything at the beginning but eventually turns tyrant and monster), and the wretchedness to which the rewriting process so often ends--to say nothing of how often writers, like software engineers, find themselves running behind schedule, making the process that much more miserable.

Captain Marvel 2 (The Marvels) Comes Out Friday. What Do the Predictions for the Movie's Opening Weekend Look Like?

Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast for the opening weekend of Captain Marvel 2 had the film debuting to a $50-$75 million gross.

Now, as might have been expected given the erosion of their expectations for the film in the subsequent weeks, with the weekend upon us, the high end of the range they project is below the low end of the range they announced a month ago--$35-$49 million.

Of course, as Boxoffice Pro published this figure as part of the weekend forecast, not a long-range forecast, they have not published a prediction for the film's overall run. However, they generally had in mind the movie making somewhere around two-and-a-half times its opening weekend gross (a typical figure for such movies until recently at least), which, when they still predicted a $45-$62 million opener, worked out to an estimate of $109-$156 million last week. Should we apply the same multiplier to the $35-$49 million opening weekend, then we would end up with the movie making somewhere in the range of $85 million and $125 million--in other words, plausibly falling short of the $100 million mark that even The Flash managed to breach, and making Ant-Man 3 look like a spectacular success by comparison.

Make no mistake--if this projection is accurate this is bad, for the movie, and for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to which it is so important. But is it accurate? Just a few days ago I attempted to chart out the most favorable scenario for which the film's backers could hope--that audiences actually like the movie, and good word of mouth gives it legs that partially redeem a weak opener, as happened to some extent with Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and as happened with that other Disney release Elemental especially. This could still happen--but to say it is likely would be another, different, thing, and it now seems a little less likely with the critics proving not at all kind to the movie. (Right now the Rotten Tomatoes score stands at 58 percent.) Of course, we have seen audiences prove much more favorable than critics to films this year that ended up performing above expectations--as with those video game-based hits The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy's. (For the latter film the audience score is an approving 88 percent--against the appalling 29 percent score the critics gave it.) Still, The Marvels seemed to me unlikely to be that kind of critics-hate-it-but-viewers-love-it success (the more in as the critics have been so good to the MCU films over the years), leaving this movie that much longer and harder any road to success.

Say it With Me: "Celebrities Do Not Write Their Own Books."

The celebrity memoir epitomizes the logic of publishers--selling the name on the book rather than its content, which is so often banal, and at any rate unlikely to be by the person whose name and face are on the cover anyway.

Why is that? The plain and simple answer is that while idiots do not realize or admit it writing is hard work and a demanding craft--especially at the level of producing anything remotely resembling a publishable book-length manuscript, or even a first draft of one, which is likely to be a very time-consuming activity. The pampered high school drop-outs who make up the Hollywood A-list are unlikely to have the skills to perform the task, the opportunity to go about it if they are constantly out in front of the camera as they seem to be, or the patience to endure the grind even if they really try their hand at it, especially when they can with much greater ease and profit spend their time shilling for their lines of crappy "wellness" products instead as they leave the writing to someone else.

Still, obvious as this all seems, the fact is rarely spoken--indeed, seems to me to be even less spoken than it was back when C. Wright Mills estimated in his classic White Collar that the chances of a book by a "prominent but non-literary" public figure actually having been written by that public figure as no better than "fifty-fifty," and that in an era in which I think it safe to say the odds of famous people really writing their own memoirs were probably a good deal higher than they are today (and this going all the more for the kind of famous people whose books make the lists).

On the Popularity of Celebrity Memoirs

I have previously remarked the prominence of celebrity "memoirs" ghostwritten on behalf of illiterates which say absolutely nothing, and the eagerness with which the public seems to eat them up, rewarding the Dauriats of Park Avenue for their so crassly selling the "distinguished" names on the covers of books rather than the stuff between the covers so that the already rich and famous get richer and more famous while they tell real writers who may actually have something to say to (to put it relatively politely) go to hell.

Where the memoirs of celebrities from the world of politics--"Showbusiness for ugly people"--are concerned, those who find this reality distasteful and depressing at least can take comfort in the thought that their sales figures substantially represent purchases by backers looking to subsidize and promote their bought politicians, and reward them for services rendered, directly and by helping the books be bestsellers by making them bestsellers. (Eddie Murphy's 1992 satire The Distinguished Gentleman may not have been particularly well-received by the critics, but it did have its moments--not least Joe Don Baker's Olaf Andersen thundering at Lane Smith's Dick Dodge that among much else he had done for him he bought ten thousand copies of his "boring, dull-ass autobiography!")

Alas, in contrast with the faked show of interest in the self-serving garbage that the memoir of a career politician looking to get further up the greasy pole must necessarily be, a great portion of the public's apparent enthusiasm for the supposed "Big Thinks" of people from just plain "Showbusiness" seems to me to be genuine--such that while costly publicity efforts doubtless played their part in making their books bestsellers (and indeed, any bestselling book is probably open to the charge that it is a bestseller because its backers bought their way onto the bestseller lists these days), these publishing blockbusters cannot be wholly dismissed on those grounds, however much many of us would like to think so.

Will The Marvels Be the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Solo?

When Disney took over Lucasfilm it was clear that what the management hoped was that it would turn the Star Wars universe into a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)-style hit machine, putting out multiple blockbusters a year.

This was probably always a longshot. There was a profound difference between the shared universe of Marvel's superheroes, with their separate though interlinkable adventures, and the cinematic equivalent of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, with regard to the potential to appeal to a really mass audience. And reality caught up with Disney-Lucasfilm that way in 2018, when Solo crashed and burned at the summer box office, putting paid to plans to make Star Wars the equivalent of the MCU. The only Star Wars movie that came out after that was the conclusion of the new main-line trilogy in 2019, after which nothing has appeared--and will not be appearing before 2025 at the earliest as Kathleen Kennedy now speaks not in terms of the spectacularly high output MCU but the low output James Bond films (these days, very, very low output), all as new Star Wars is mainly reserved for the small screen.

Right now it looks as if Captain Marvel 2--aka The Marvels--will be as big a flop as Solo, and perhaps even worse. (Solo made over $200 million domestically--more like $250 million domestically when you adjust for inflation--whereas according to the latest data Captain Marvel 2 may be lucky to make even $150 million.)

Given all this one may wonder if Captain Marvel 2 will not be the MCU's Solo, a flop that forces Disney to back off and profoundly change course. However, sheer inertia will keep the movie from being that, no matter how badly it does at the box office.

After all, when Solo hit theaters Disney's Star Wars movies had been coming out for a mere two-and-a-half years, with Solo only the fourth film in the sequence.

By contrast the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been going strong for over fifteen years now, with Captain Marvel 2 the 33rd movie in the sequence. What Disney merely hoped to achieve with Star Wars, but did not, it did achieve with the MCU, especially in Phase Three--which at this point may be feeling more and more distant for fans, but for the executives probably feels like it was "just yesterday," and not just because time passes differently for old people, or because executive types are slow on the uptake. After all, if things have gone less well since, Spider-Man: No Way Home was as big a success as could have been hoped for even pre-pandemic; if they did not do so well as hoped, the latest Dr. Strange, Thor, Black Panther sequels were among the most profitable movies anyone in Hollywood had in 2022 (#4, #5 and #9 on Deadline's list); Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was at least a respectable performer in the end; and even the disappointment with Ant-Man 3 can be chalked up to exaggerated expectations for what an Ant-Man movie could do and the Chinese market becoming less open to the franchise rather than catastrophic across-the-board collapse.

The result is that where with Solo there was little cushioning against their worst fears that they were acting in a profoundly foolish way in regard to Star Wars. By contrast, even the worst that has been predicted for Captain Marvel 2 runs up against that massive success already behind them so that they can think of it as a fluke and hope for better the next time.

Or several times.

After all, even if the studio really is given pause by Captain Marvel 2's failure, that same matter of inertia leaves them heavily invested right now in a plethora of additional MCU films--with Captain America 4 already in post-production, and three more movies in production (Deadpool 3, The Thunderbolts, Blade), enough to keep the movies coming until at least 2025. Meanwhile there is the lesser investment in two more movies already in "pre-production" (Fantastic Four, Avengers: The Kang Dynasty), to say nothing of others "in development."

Lucasfilm had nothing comparable to that roster of films going when Solo made the studio's management change course, and one cannot picture Disney-Lucasfilm shutting all that down simply because one movie underperformed (however severely). The investment is recognizably the bigger when we consider Marvel's streaming TV empire (Star Wars hadn't got one yet as of the summer of 2018), and the revenue Marvel derives from the way the new films keep up interest in and trickles of revenue coming from the increasingly vast collection of old films (32 before this one!), the merchandising, and the rest on a scale that may also dwarf Star Wars when one puts it all together.

As if all that were not enough the fact that even as Star Wars was not working out Disney was doing so well with its other properties made it easier for the studio chiefs to make the hard decision to back away from its earlier plans for that franchise. After all, they had Pixar, they had their live-action adaptations of their animated classics, they had the MCU, all generating billion-dollar movies in ticket sales on a regular basis. (Indeed, counting the 2019 Spider-Man film the top eight movies at the box office were all Disney productions, each and every one a grosser of $1 billion or more worldwide and the eight together collectively accounting for over $10 billion in ticket sales.)

Now the MCU, even in its weakened state, looks like their strongest asset, with any replacement a long way off, making it far more likely that those calling the shots at Disney will feel that much more pressure to hold on to the MCU for dear life, and hope for the best. The result is that there is probably zero prospect of Captain Marvel 2's failure (should it fail--let us not forget this has not actually happened yet) making Disney change course with the MCU the way that it did with Star Wars. However, it could mean some changes in the longer-term planning, and perhaps more caution in regard to those projects they can still alter.