Headwinds for the Cinematic Blockbuster?

When considering the way the movie business has become more blockbuster-centered it seems one should not only be attentive to the way in which blockbusters crowd other kinds of fare out of the market (driving it to streaming, and usually, to obscurity on streaming), but also the frailty of the blockbuster model itself, and what that frailty means for the industry now so reliant on it. In particular I see that frailty as leaving it susceptible to at least four "headwinds" worth discussing:

1. The Continued Decline of Theater-Going.
As of 2023 people are returning to their pre-pandemic theater-going habits. However, --but it is worth remembering that these were already under strain before the pandemic, which seems to have encouraged them in the tendency to not come out for anything but the biggest "tentpoles." One may add that the pandemic has meant that when they are willing to "come out" there are fewer places for them to go. Actual theater closures have been less numerous than I once thought they might be given the way ticket sales crashed during the pandemic and have since stayed depressed--the total number of theaters shrinking less than a tenth. Still, in doing so they have likely taken a certain amount of custom with them (as some people have lost a favorite theater, now have to travel a longer way to get to any theater, etc., making them less easily persuaded to go), while one cannot be sure the closure wave has run its course, especially given the broader economic situation. Besides the obvious implications of downturn and rising interest rates for theaters as for all other business, there is what it means for the moviegoing public. In brief, between inflation and recession those who are seeing movies again may be more careful with their money, while, one should not forget, for many the trip to the theater (the pricey tickets, gas and parking, the cost of obscenely marked-up concessions, etc., as against staying home and watching streaming as they eat what they have in the refrigerator) is a luxury with all that means for the viability of the remaining theaters. All of this may portend further disruption of an ever-more fragile habit of theater-going--and the revenue stream from the $20 theater tickets that Hollywood cannot get along without in anything like its current form.

2. The Accumulating Holes in the Movie Industry's Balance Sheets.
In considering the matter of interest rates it is worth acknowledging that if this has been a problem for theaters it has probably been a bigger one for the studios. During the period of ultra-loose monetary policy, in which central bankers made giving away money to investors a cornerstone of the growth model--and business gorged itself on the effectively free money, with the would-be streaming giants no exception as they funded vast amounts of "content" for the sake of building up a subscriber base, with relatively little thought for what the limits to its profitability were. Add to that the revenue collapse associated with the depression of theater-going for three years as of this month, and counting--with its pressure to borrow that much more cash. Of course, the surge of inflation reduced the "real" weight of studio debts--but the more recent rise in interest rates meant the cheap borrowing was at an end. Between that debt accumulation and the higher cost of borrowing something has to give--and indeed it has. Certainly we see that in the greater reserve toward streaming among Netflix, WBD, Disney, among others. But, even as in the wake of their unhappy experiments with releasing big-budget movies to streaming on their opening weekend in theaters the studios affirm their commitment to theatrical release, it seems far from implausible that all this is not factoring into studio thinking about the money they put up for those theatrically released features. This may not make them more willing to invest in small movies--but they are still likely to be more reserved toward big ones than they were before, with reinforcing that tendency the fact that their prospects for both audience, and for investors, may both be shrinking.

3. The Fragmentation of the Global Film Market.
Amid the wretched, crisis-ridden performance of the neoliberal economic vision, worse than ever this past decade; the resurgence of dissent against it that has substantially taken, or been channeled into, nationalistic forms; and the deterioration of great power relations, exemplified by the fighting in Ukraine and the looming danger of war in the Far East; the world economy is "deglobalizing." It is unclear how far this process will be allowed to go in this deeply interconnected world (even now the level of global economic integration represented by trade and investment flows has no precedent from before the twenty-first century), but cinema (first and foremost an economic enterprise to those in charge of the industry) has certainly not been untouched by that process. The result has been diminished access for Hollywood to critical international markets, with all it spells for its earnings (Marvel's Phase Four being shut out of China, for instance, likely cost it its cut of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of ticket sales and much else in that country). It has also reduced access to sources of financing of such movies. (Who would have thought that in making even Top Gun 2 Hollywood would have got financing from Chinese and Russian investors?) The result is that the Hollywood studios are not only cut off from ticket-buyers on whom they depend, but important sources of capital by the process, just as, again, the interest rate's going up has put the squeeze on domestic funding--and the number of safe investments for them to make dwindles.

4. The Wearing Out of the Old Franchises--and the Lack of New Ones.

In our time it is a truism that businesses all across the media spectrum have in recent decades preferred to mine old successes than prospect for new riches. (Consider just how old just about all those comic book superheroes are. Happy eighty-fifth birthday Superman!) These days the tendency seems to be catching up with them as just about every one of those franchises looks old and tired--and indeed, even the genres to which they belong look old and tired. After all, if the current superhero boom can be traced back to 2000's X-Men, then we have had nearly a quarter of a century of big-budget A-list superhero features as a standard and increasingly large part of our cinematic diet--an extremely long run for any cinematic fashion, with this exemplified by how studios have fallen into the habit of telling and retelling and re-retelling the same stories about the same characters over and over and over again. (Thus it is not just the case that we have more X-Men movies, but we have seen remakes of the origin stories of both Batman and Spider-Man, while the X-Men's Dark Phoenix saga is now a twice-told tale.) Even the claqueurs of the entertainment press can no longer pretend otherwise--while as Star Wars and Marvel and DC look ever-creakier it is far from clear that anything else can serve in their places amid all those long years of no one even trying to make anything new.

I suspect that the irony goes right over the heads of the vulgarians calling the shots. Still, limited beings that they are, they are not--in spite of the PR efforts that only the stupidest person would believe, and the suck-up writing of courtiers who would tell us these people actually care about movies, or anything else but their salaries--they are not wholly oblivious to the fact that they have been foisting stale garbage on the public over and over and over again. Certainly to go by the revelations of the Sony hack of a decade ago the executives were certainly aware of what they had on their hands with the Bond film Spectre long before disappointing reviews and disappointing box office revenue confirmed it for everyone. Some of them may well be feeling the same way about their handling of more recent high concept action-adventure franchises--caught on to the fact of its being run into the ground the same way they ran "the one that started it all" into the ground. But even if this is so I have no expectation whatsoever of their changing tack anytime soon--just their getting tackier, as they ever more shamelessly serve up the same refuse to ever-diminishing returns, financially as well as creatively.