What Do The Fabelmans, Batgirl and Rust Tell Us About the Future of the Movies?

Especially as two of the three films I name in the title of this post have not even been released--one of them, in fact, unlikely to even be completed, let alone see the light of day--while the other movie has actually been very little-seen, it may be best to offer a word or two about each one of them.

The Fabelmans is a drama Steven Spielberg made on the basis of his experiences growing up that, if carrying the highly salable Spielberg name and much loved by the critics, was probably never going to play like Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park, or even Schindler's List or Lincoln. Still, box office-watchers had expected the film to do better than it has. (Its first weekend in wide release saw it take in a mere $3 million, while, even with the bump from its slew of seven Oscar nominations--including Best Picture, Best Director and two for the cast's performances--all it has taken in at the North American box office is a bit under $17 million--less than half the reported production budget of $40 million.)

Batgirl, as the reader has probably guessed, is a Warner Bros. Discovery production starring just that character intended for streaming. The production, which ran into trouble partly on account of the pandemic, and underwent a change of directors, saw its budget swell from $70 million to over $90 million. Subsequently there was a change of leadership at the company, which judged the resulting movie's prospects in either the streaming market or in theaters too poor for the movie to be worth completing, and, according to the prevailing reports, decided to just bury the unfinished movie and take the tax write-off.

Rust is an upcoming Western starring Alec Baldwin (who also has story and producer credits)--and if you have heard about this one it is probably because Baldwin, and the movie's armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, are up on charges of "involuntary manslaughter" as a result of his having fatally shot someone on the set with a gun he did not know to be loaded.

These are quite different films, with not much in common between them, but individually they have been recognized as each indicative of a significant trend in film production. The Fabelmans has been taken as an indication of the continued decline of the salability of drama as a theatrical experience--people generally opting to watch such movies at home. Batgirl has been an indication of the media companies' drawing back from their earlier splurging on streaming in recognition of its limits as a revenue stream (no substitute for selling $15-$20 tickets in theaters, and indeed unlikely to justify the cost of a mid-to-high-budget production like Batgirl). And Rust, where amid talk of the on-set tragedy one constantly hears reference to extreme low budgets and corner-cutting (which, for his part, actor Michael Shannon has called out as part of a bigger pattern) is indicative of the tendency in financing those films that are not "the biggest."

The result is that, while the pandemic period saw some experimentation with streaming in unprecedented ways--Disney making grade-A blockbusters like Black Widow and Mulan available at home for a surcharge on their opening weekend in theaters--any radical shift in the making and marketing of such content seems to have been made implausible by the results, the studios focusing on those theatrical releases and their as yet irreplaceable $15-20 a ticket revenue stream. These blockbusters (the enduring place of which is demonstrated not just by failures like The Fabelmans but undisputed successes like Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water) are ever-more dominated by a very few genres, above all action-adventure (and to a lesser extent, splashy animated features dominated by musical comedy), to the point of everything else not only being crowded off the multiplex screens, but people falling out of the habit of catching them there (arguably, the more easily as the theatrical, giant-screen experience provides less "added value" with other movies than it does the noisome spectacles).

Meanwhile, with producers disabused of their illusions about streaming, everything else is being made more penuriously, not only as Rust was, but such that WBD, and its rivals, would probably not authorize a project like Batgirl today (too costly to be a practical for-streaming project, but still too small a production for theaters, with this logic seemingly confirmed by the bigger budget for a Blue Beetle movie intended for theatrical release), and a movie like The Fabelmans, especially when not made by a Spielberg, have ever less chance of being authorized as a production on such a scale.

In short--giant action movies and cartoons at the theater, and the relegation of pretty much everything else to cut-rate streaming, with very little in between. For the film-maker and the film-lover alike it is not a happy situation--a hardening of the already oppressive constraints on what could be made. However, it seems far better to acknowledge that forthrightly than indulge in the mindless boosterism so tiresomely standard for the entertainment press--the more in as it is really just a confirmation of where most of those with any observational skills at all knew things were going way before the pandemic.