Artificial Intelligence Enters Into Our Labor Disputes. (A Few Thoughts on the WGA Strike.)

I have written about the "writing life" from time to time--often out of exasperation at the nonsense about it which the media so often inflicts on us. (Indeed, I can think of no remotely contemporary depiction of that life that is even the least little bit as truthful as Balzac's Lost Illusions, or Jack London's Martin Eden.)

Most of the time I have for my subject writers of print fiction. However, the looming threat of a Writer's Guild of America (WGA) strike has brought renewed attention to the conditions in which those who write for the screen toil--which, like the conditions for working people in any other line, have not been improving. Quite the contrary, the WGA informed us in a bulletin this past March that those writers who are actually working are making less--in real, inflation-adjusted terms, almost a quarter (23 percent) less--than was the case a decade ago.

Where this process is concerned one can argue for "organic" changes in the market--like the rise of streaming--but it is also the case that the production companies and studios have fought bitterly to cut writers out of the gains.

In considering the situation it seems worth noting that the writers are up against businesses that, hardly genial to their workers in even the best of times, are very hard-pressed now--battered by the pandemic, and coming to grips with their earlier reckless spending on content as interest rates go up, compelling severe cuts in production. (Disney is a particularly conspicuous case, but Netflix, Warner Bros. and the rest are all doing the same. Remember how WBD buried a nearly complete Batgirl movie rather than put it out there?) The result is that they are even less likely than usual to be concilatory.

Of course, in post-Reagan America organized labor is not exactly known for winning fights with management. Indeed, had the WGA done better out of the last strike in 2007 writers would not have seen their wages collapse as they have. But collapse they did, leaving the matter of how writers are compensated for their work on streamed content--indeed, anything besides the network television we are always told is in a state of advanced decline--unacceptable, as they look ahead to still more radical changes. In coverage of the issue we are seeing reference to how artificial intelligence as such will fit into the picture, not too unreasonably given what some think it may be doing before even a three year contract runs its course. After all, even if the time when a chatbot could crank out whole ready-for-filming scripts of even mediocre quality seems still some way off, its merely producing something a script editor can fix up into something passable would be plenty to reduce the demand for writers--and the bargaining position of those who still land work. Indeed I would not be surprised to find that the studios are already quietly trying to make it happen.

The result is that, as one anonymous member of the Guild said, "We're looking at the extinction of writing as a profession." Should the Guild actually act in accordance with that thinking this might be a long, grueling contest such as Hollywood has not seen in a very, very long time. That seems unlikely to have much of an immediate effect on the saturated media consumer just yet, but it may be a sign of things to come as artificial intelligence as such increasingly enters into the disputes of labor with management.

The Profitability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Phase Three--and Afterward

Taken together Deadline's lists of the most profitable movies of the year from 2015 on give those of us who are not studio insiders a better-than-usual picture of the economics of the blockbuster because they go beyond production budgets and box office grosses to a fuller accounting of costs and revenues, at least at the top of the market. In the process they give us a fairly good picture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's commercial performance, precisely because it has been so prominent at the top, with this going in particular for Phase Three--ten of the MCU's eleven third phase films making Deadline's lists, which is to say, all but Ant-Man 2 (an omission unlikely to skew the picture very much even if we had the numbers, given its lower cost and lower earnings).

Going by Deadline's numbers Disney-Marvel expended some $5.6 billion on the ten films listed here, counting everything from production, to prints and ads, to overhead and interest, to video costs, to participations and residuals. Beyond those expenses it made some $3.5 billion from theatrical rentals, home entertainment, streaming/TV--a better than sixty percent "cash-on-cash" return for the lot. Granted, this was money in yesteryear's prices spread out in rather uneven fashion over many years, but making some account of inflation it seems to me that we still have a $7 billion or so outlay in March 2023 dollars, and over $4 billion in earnings above that outlay, not changing the proportions much.*

All of this only underlines what a force to be reckoned with the MCU was at its height, commercially speaking. Of course, this was disproportionately due to the two-part Avengers battle with Thanos, which took in $1.4 billion in estimated profit in 2018-2019 (and $1.7 billion in real terms in today's dollars), but even without them I calculate the average for the other non-Avengers movies discussed here as (helped by the particular successes of Spider-Man: Far From Home, Black Panther and Captain Marvel) in the vicinity of $275 million in today's terms (and even the weaker Ant-Man 2 unlikely to drag this down much were it included).

The result is a very high standard of profitability indeed--the kind that no reasonable person can expect to see go on for any franchise for very long, and which Disney especially should not have expected to see go on forever given its experience with Star Wars--in which Episode VII made over a $900 million profit, and then Solo made a $77 million (or even worse) loss just two-and-a-half years later, a literal billion dollar drop in returns.

The MCU has yet to have its Solo, of course, and I am not sure that it will, the MCU perhaps too big for even a failure that severe and that unambiguous to stop in its tracks (especially so long as the films bring viewers to Disney's streaming service, and help to keep MCU merchandise selling). All the same, this puts into perspective the performance of its most recent movies. Thor 4 and Black Panther 2 were still money-makers, but brought in just half the profit their predecessors did, while looking at Ant-Man 3's theatrical performance it seems possible that it might barely break even, or lose a little money, even with the home entertainment-type revenue counted in, while the upcoming releases of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and The Marvels may be up against significant headwinds, and any Avengers vs. Thanos-caliber event, or even Spider-Man: No Way Home-caliber event, looking a long way off as of April 2023.

The fact matters the more because even if this is cause for anxiety rather than full-blown disaster, Disney faces so many problems on so many different fronts. The company is now coping not just with the hole in its balance sheet made not just by the pandemic (which took a toll on its movies like everyone else's), but also reckless overspending on for-streaming content (admittedly a problem everyone else had), the shaky results of its investment in Lucasfilm as of late (with Indiana Jones 5 not a sure winner and the plans for the Star Wars franchise on the big screen remaining unsettled year in, year out), and the massive losses in its original mainstay of animation (with Strange World and Lightyear together losing the studio over $300 million all by themselves, on top of the money almost certainly lost by the hugely expense yet straight-to-streaming Turning Red). All of that means that it really, really needs wins here, and these are getting to be fewer and smaller.

* I adjusted the figures by converting the figures’ value in the month of the movie’s release for March 2023 prices using the Consumer Price Index and got $6.7 billion in costs, $4.1 billion in return-on-cash--a method that seemed sufficiently rough to merit rounding to the nearest billion to be on the safe side.

Beyond Ticket Sales: What Movies Make From Streaming and Television

Having long been aware that theatrical release is only part of how a film makes back the money put into them, when I offer my estimates of "hit" and "flop," money-maker and money-loser, I try to emphasize that I am only assessing the economics of the theatrical release, and not the overall performance. This is partly because important as the box office is in itself, and indicative as it tends to be of the broader outcome (it is generally the theatrical hit that makes the most in home entertainment, and merchandising, and vice-versa), it is not everything, with the figures on home entertainment and the like that tend to be less available sometimes making an important difference.

As it happens Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament" of many years now has given us a far from comprehensive but still noteworthy base of information for judging film earnings from home entertainment options like streaming and television--indeed, one plausibly useful enough that it seems to me that some generalization about how this works these days is possible. Going by the data it collected for 2015-2019 in reasonably consistent fashion, with the pattern of which Deadline's figures for 2022 seem broadly consistent, it seems that the ten or so most profitable "blockbusters" of the year make about 57 percent of their net earnings from theaters, 43 percent from the home entertainment/streaming/TV options. The biggest hits in theaters tend to make the most money from the other sources, too, but they still tend to make relatively more of their net from theaters, the lower earners relatively less. Thus Avengers 3 and 4 picked up two-thirds of their money theatrically, Avatar 2 almost four-fifths of its money in theaters at last check, while the horror hit Smile made less than half there, and Strange World not much more than a quarter.

The last of these films verifies the principle that the theatrical release is usually the key indicator. That Strange World made via home entertainment, TV, streaming three times what it did from theatrical releases did not save it from being the worst flop of the year, leaving Disney "another $200 million in the red..)

All the same, there are sometimes significant surprises, with Black Panther 2 a case in point. Its $325 million from home entertainment, television, streaming made the difference between its barely breaking even, or losing money (its theatrical run was not unjustly seen as a disappointment), and its being one of the most profitable big movies of 2022.

The Profitability of Thor 4: A Note

When Thor 4 came out expectations were high for the film, some thinking that this Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) franchise that tends to play more like a Guardians of the Galaxy movie than an Avengers movie was going to break into a higher tier of moneymaker. This was not wholly unreasonable. after all, each Thor movie had made more than the last, with the process gone far enough that in 2022 terms Thor 3 (Thor: Ragnarok) was a billion dollar hit--its $854 million in late 2017 about $1.025 billion in summer 2022 prices. However, pulling in a mere $761 million Thor 4 actually made less in nominal terms, and a quarter less in real terms (with the fact only partially attributable to Marvel's shutout from China), and that result quite naturally received as a letdown.* Indeed, the suspicion that the movie failed to break even on its theatrical run would seem to be justified by the numbers Deadline published this month--the theatrical run bringing in $350 million, as against the $455 million spent on the production, prints and ads, and overhead and interest, while participations and residuals also had to be paid (these eventually totaling another $57 million).

Of course, there was home entertainment and streaming/TV, which came close to matching the theatrical run's earnings with another $300 million. The result was that Thor 4 still ended up with a respectable profit of $103 million.

Still, it seems worth noting that just as with Black Panther 2 this meant a halving of the profit from the last entry in the series in real terms, Thor 3 having made a profit of $174 million back in 2017 according to the same formula (which worked out to about $209 million at the time Thor 4 came out).

It is not the direction in which Disney-Marvel needed the numbers to move, in either case. Indeed, if the numbers keep moving in this direction, profitability quickly becomes nonexistent. Yet with $100 million more made than what was spent it is no franchise-killer.

* Thor 3 made about $112 million in China--about $135 million in summer 2022 terms, such that even without it, merely matching Thor 3 in the rest of the world the movie should have made about $890 million. Putting it another way, the film's non-Chinese gross dropped about 14 percent from the last Thor movie, in contrast with the increases previously seen.

2022's Where the Crawdads Sing at the Box Office

Delia Owens' novel Where the Crawdads Sing was a colossal bestseller, lasting for over three years on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. Predictably made into a film, that movie was released in the summer of 2022.

Compared with similarly successful bestsellers made into major movies--The Da Vinci Code, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey--this adaptation’s run in theaters seemed relatively low profile, Crawdads, in what, a very few exceptions apart (Avatar 2, Top Gun 2) was a less than booming year, failed to crack the long-since inflated $100 million barrier and finished behind such "underperforming" films as Elvis, Nope and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore at the North American box office (while doing still less well internationally).

However, according to Deadline it actually proved to be one of the more profitable films of the year, earning nearly $200 million on an outlay of $123 million (only a fifth of which was spent on the actual production) for a 61 percent "cash-on-cash return."

In doing so Crawdads was that rarity of recent years, a film made for a relatively small amount of money that--even without being a horror film or an arty critic's darling that gets heavily promoted to a wider audience (the film seems to have been as disliked by critics as it was liked by its viewers)--managed to sell millions of tickets. The result is an undeniable hit on a smaller scale (making a little less than the ill-fated Fantastic Beasts 3, but costing only a small fraction of what that movie did, so that it came out far ahead by this metric).

All the same, successful as the film was--and important the book's built-in audience was to making it a success--I find myself wondering if the modest scale of that success is not in its way suggestive of books mattering less in contemporary culture than they did just a short time earlier.

"Is Black Panther 2 a Commercial Failure?" My Last Word on the Subject (Probably)

Back when Black Panther 2 hit theaters I took up the question of the movie's commercial performance raising the possibility that given the reports of its budget (we heard figures like $250 million tossed about), the movie was not going to make back its cost in theatrical release, even as I allowed that other revenue streams could compensate.

Deadline's recent figures suggest this thinking was not far off the mark. The backers of the movie spent some $376 million on production, prints and ads, and overhead and interest, even before participations and residuals came into the picture--which eventually came to another $60 million.

By contrast the studio made $425 million off of theatrical rentals.

The result was that, judged on even the most optimistic accounting, the film only really began to make money when non-theatrical revenue streams were counted in. Of course, when they are counted in the result is clearly a healthy profit--enough for Deadline to rank the film as one of 2022's most profitable blockbusters. Still, this is not the performance Disney-Marvel probably hoped for. (Top Gun 2, and even the far more costly Avatar 2, were profitable long before the end of their theatrical runs.)

The gap between anticipations and results is especially evident when one compares Black Panther 2 to the original Black Panther. That movie, according to the same formula, was almost twice as profitable--bringing in some $476 million in profit, as against the $259 million the sequel brought in. Adjusting the figures for inflation makes the original Black Panther look better still--its $476 million in 2018 equal to about $570 million at the time of Black Panther 2's release. This leaves the second film's mass of profit less than half that of the first film, and the margin of profitability, more or less, commensurately smaller (a "cash-on-cash" return of some 53 percent for the sequel, as against 92 percent for the original). The result is that if Disney eventually made money, a good bit of it, the result still bespeaks a path of diminishing returns that may not exactly have them rushing to green-light Black Panther 3--the more in as Black Panther 2 was scarcely out of theaters before Ant-Man 3 flopped in a manner that could leave it a money-loser, even with home entertainment and the rest going some way to making up the shortfall.

The result is that, while any movie that brings in a fifty percent profit on such a colossal outlay is absolutely no flop, it was very far from being an unmitigated success--the word "disappointment" likely not inappropriate. Meanwhile, beyond Black Panther 2 it seems to say a lot that even with streaming proving no substitute for the box office (as the retreat from high spending on for-streaming content reminds us) movies are now routinely budgeted at such a level that even movies ranking among the biggest hits fail to make back their money from ticket-buyers alone. One can take it as suggestive of the decadence of the blockbuster model, just like what we had with musicals in the ‘60s--with no successor in sight.

Deadline's List of the Most Profitable Films of 2022: Some Thoughts

Not long ago I offered some comment on Deadline's report on the most unprofitable films of 2022, as calculated not simply on the basis of production budget vs. box office, but more comprehensive information on expenditure and revenue.

It seems to me that there is also something to be said about the most profitable films, on which it also reported, presenting two lists of them--one comprised of the most profitable "blockbusters" (high-budget, high-profile, high-grossing movies) and of films overall (with the latter, going by relative profitability, more inclusive of smaller films that brought in more money in relation to their cost, even when the mass of profit was much less than that brought in by the blockbusters).

Where the blockbusters were concerned I was completely unsurprised to see Avatar 2 at the top, followed by Top Gun 2. Colossal as the investment in Avatar 2 was, so was its gross--while in the wake of James Cameron's remarks foregrounding the issue of what the film had to make in order to "break even" the entertainment press happened to note, and report, that the movie entered the territory of profitability somewhere around the $1.5 billion mark (!), after which the movie kept on making money until it hit $2.3 billion (a lot less than the original Avatar, especially in real terms, but all the same, so much that any question of disappointment is completely unreasonable). Meanwhile Top Gun 2 went far, far above and beyond expectations in such a way that its inclusion here was no less predictable. I was unsurprised to see Minions: The Rise of Gru in the #3 spot given how well it did--a comparative bright spot in what, Top Gun 2's success apart, was not exactly an impressive summer commercially.

By contrast I was more surprised to see Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2 on the list, given that, while one expects Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero movies here, and they were indeed major moneymakers by the usual standard (bringing in a combined $1.8 billion in ticket sales), there were perceptions that their grosses were not all that had been hoped for (which I argued for myself). Still, if they could have done better at the box office they were still solid earners from the standpoint of the bigger picture, at least--and reminders that if the MCU, like so many other huge franchises (James Bond, Star Wars), has passed its peak it remains a long way from being so unviable as to be given up (even if, in the wake of the disappointment of Ant-Man 3, that day may not be so far off as it seemed even a little while ago).

Meanwhile the more inclusive, relative profit-minded list of most profitable films was predictably dominated by horror films (the reboot of Scream, Black Phone, M3GAN--the latter counted as "2022" mainly because the Deadline people wanted it to be, I suppose), for if horror movies are no match for the superhero epics at the box office they still offer enough return on a low budget to be worth putting out theatrically. The two exceptions to the pattern were Where the Crawdads Sing and Everything Everywhere All at Once--the one benefiting from the colossal bestsellerdom of the book it adapted and the built-in audience it brought, while the other was one of those arthouse-type movies that end up reaching a broader audience (helped, I think, by its blockbuster-ish elements--the movie being a martial arts battle across the multiverse).

In short, as much as the blockbusters even the smaller hits have been just as predictable as the big. Indeed, as other hits, and misses, of the year indicate, the range of material that stands a chance of successful theatrical release is ever narrower, and deviation from that narrowness ever less forgiven by the Market.

Han Solo and Captain Kirk in Tom Clancy's Star Wars: Revisiting Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin as it Might Have Been.

Recently revisiting the matter of the ultimately failed attempt to make a film adaptation of Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin back in the 1990s I was reminded of the involvement of William Shatner in the production--and of course, struck by how a movie about "Star Wars" which brings together "Han Solo" and "Captain Kirk" can seem replete with metafictional possibilities to the point of their overshadowing everything else.

Of course, there was some precedent for a big Harrison Ford-starring action movie series having something comparable without its dominating everything. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had “James Bond” as Indiana Jones' father--as he was in a creative sense. Not only was it the case that the James Bond films paved the way for later high-concept action-adventure blockbuster filmmaking in a broad way. George Lucas himself constantly cited the Bond films not only as predecessor but inspiration, such that he would reference it when making his early sales pitches to the studios about the kind of movie he meant to make when he was trying to get Star Wars into production, with this apparently carrying over to Dr. Jones. (After all, he offered Steven Spielberg the idea specifically because he fancied a chance to direct a Bond movie that was simply not forthcoming in those days.*)

Still, I am not sure to what extent the broad public has been attentive to this. Indeed, I have been struck by how those writing the history of the making of Star Wars, and the broader rise of the blockbuster, both those favorably and unfavorably disposed toward the film and its associated franchise, cut the precedent of James Bond out of the picture, such that the general viewers were, if anything, less likely to see very much in "James Bond" and "Indiana Jones" being in a movie together.

One might add that, if they had hardly forgotten that Sean Connery was James Bond once upon a time (indeed, before the pretense that the rebooted films are the only ones that count, Connery was in fact remembered as the best of them), he appeared here as being as un-Bondian figure as one could imagine, a tweedy old professor of Medieval literature very much out of his element when shooting it out with the Nazis. (One can add that, at least according to Joseph McBride's biography of Spielberg, Spielberg got squeamish about keeping the bit about the elder Jones' affair with Elsa Schneider, and only Connery's insistence saw it retained--about which McBride quotes Connery remarking that he "didn't want [Henry Jones Sr.] to be such a wimp.")

It helped that Connery, more than most figures who get to be so associated with a major franchise, managed to make a name for himself beyond and after that franchise, with at the time of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade's release in 1989 Connery having starred in a long string of major non-Bond films, many well-received critically and successful commercially (like The Wind and the Lion, or Robin and Marian), or otherwise making their mark (like the oddity that is Zardoz, or the cult hit Highlander, or the ambitious misfire that was The Name of the Rose). Indeed, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar just two years earlier for his performance in The Untouchables, which was likely far fresher in viewers' minds than his run as Bond, which, the merely middling success of Never Say Never Again six years earlier apart, ended in 1971--all as, arguably, the cachet of the Bond series was at something of a low point (as we saw when Licence to Kill proved that franchise's biggest-ever flop that same summer), with all that implies for how much anyone would have thought about it.

Altogether, while it was quite possible to see James Bond-as-Indiana-Jones'-father as a sort of inside joke that did not make very much difference to most, and certainly did not turn the movie into a joke.

By contrast, it is almost impossible to see William Shatner and not think of . . . Captain Kirk, the more in as between TV, film and video gaming he not only played the character for at least four decades (which made the more impression because of Shatner's infamous impression on screen--the highly theatrical line delivery with its entirely ungrammatical dramatic pauses, the self-deprecating sense of humor), but how he has so strongly associated himself with that figure. Thus did we see William Shatner officially playing himself over and over again in episodes and even films where he appeared precisely because he had been Captain Kirk (as in 1998's indie film Swingers-for-Star Trek fans, Free Enterprise), while even when not officially playing himself he was apt to be playing off of the association with Captain Kirk somehow--all as, in his numerous non-acting public appearances, he never let us forget the connection, not least by writing, directing and starring in the documentary The Captains (2011), which is about his interviews with the other five Star Trek captains of the small and large screens. A different attitude from Connery's relationship to James Bond is harder to imagine, and depending on just how big Shatner's part would have been in the Cardinal movie it would likely have been much more remarked, and much more consequential for the viewing experience--such that looking back at this ‘90s-era idea one can only wonder, "Just what is the deal with that?"

* These days the Bond franchise's runners love hiring big-name auteur directors from all over the place to helm the movies (Marc Foster, Sam Mendes, Cary Joji Fukunaga), but back then they were a "creative producer's" show (specifically Albert R. Broccoli's show), with the directors local Brits who had often worked in prior Bond films in lower-level functions. John Glen, who helmed the five '80s-era EON Bond films (For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill), had been with the franchise since the '60s, working as editor and second unit director on On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker before getting the job.

About That The Cardinal of the Kremlin Movie They Never Made . . .

Considering the reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie I find myself thinking more about those Ryanverse projects that never came to pass--like that literal generation-long effort to make a Without Remorse movie before the Michael B. Jordan-starring effort made it to Amazon streaming (like the version that John Milius was getting together back in the '90s), and of course, what would have been the third Harrison Ford-starring Jack Ryan movie, The Cardinal of the Kremlin. I remembered hearing about it back in the '90s, but the next Ryan movie we actually got was The Sum of All Fears with a younger Ryan played by Ben Affleck, and that was that, everyone seeming to move on, with, so far as I know not much about the development process for the Cardinal movie ever being made public. Interestingly, though, Wikipedia does report (though I have not so far traced the actual origin of the claim) that the reason Mace Neufeld (producer of all five of the Ryanverse feature films released in 1990-2015) moved on to Sum of All Fears was that Cardinal of the Kremlin ultimately proved too difficult to adapt. This seems to me extremely plausible, frankly, with three particular reasons coming to mind:

1. The story the book tells dated very quickly and very severely. Apart from The Hunt for Red October The Cardinal of the Kremlin was Clancy's most Cold War-steeped story, and in many ways less adjustable than any of his other as yet unfilmed Ryanverse books. Where Patriot Games presented a distinctly Cold War vision of international terrorism in the early '90s the Irish Republican Army was still topical enough for a movie like this (indeed, a few years on Harrison Ford would get caught up with the IRA again in 1997's The Devil's Own). The same also went for Colombian drug cartels when Clear and Present Danger hit the screen in 1994. By contrast, Cardinal focused on the then-popular topic of the American-Soviet race to develop strategic defenses, while also prominently featuring the war in Afghanistan (in which it demonized the Soviets and lionized the tribal-fundamentalist rebels fighting them), and also had plenty of good old-fashioned Cold War-vintage "tradecraft" of the dead drops-and-tails variety. There was just no pretending that all of this was happening in the '90s. Meanwhile some of what was passed off as plausible in the near future in the '80s was looking ever-more silly--not least the claims made for the imminence of dramatic breakthroughs in strategic defense and its associated technologies. (In Clancy's book--just as you saw dramatized in, for instance, the 1985 comedy Spies Like Us--the expectation was of colossal ground-based laser cannons bouncing their laser beams off of constellations of giant orbiting mirrors to almost instantly zap missiles launching on the other side of the planet.) The result was that a Cardinal of the Kremlin movie’s simply presenting a title card that tells us this all secretly happened a few years earlier would seem a lot less passable. And if you cut all this out there is just not much left.

2. The story of Cardinal is exceptionally diffuse--even by Tom Clancy's standards. While even the early "Jack Ryan" novels were generally sprawling, big-picture narratives where Ryan himself was often not present for most of the book (even in The Hunt for Red October the scenes he is actually in comprise just a third of the book) Clancy typically drew the multiple threads of his narratives together in time, space and action to give us a recognizable climax, and put Ryan where the action was, so that he could do something action-heroic enough to justify his “hero-protagonist” status. Thus, even as the Cold War crisis swirled across the North Atlantic, complete with bits like F-14s engaging Soviet fighters from the Kiev and A-10s buzzing a Kirov-class cruiser. (That this scene, only loosely connected with Ryan's action, strictly speaking inessential, and all about the equipment, was reportedly Clancy’s favorite, says a lot about the big picture, technical detail-oriented character of his writing.) Indeed, Ryan himself disappeared from view for long stretches (in the paperback edition you miss him for a hundred pages). Still, Ryan is the one who has the all-important realization that Marko Ramius was indeed defecting, and then contrives to get out to his submarine to personally conduct him westwards, aboard which he even shoots it out with a KGB agent aboard the vessel to “save the day.” In Patriot Games there was the showdown with the vengeful terrorists at his home. And in Clear and Present Danger he not only saw the special forces team that the conniving D.C. bureaucrats abandoned in Colombia extracted, but when the rescue helicopter went in Ryan flew in aboard it, manning a minigun with which he helped fight off attacking drug cartel soldiers. Alas, this does not happen in Cardinal of the Kremlin, where instead the "climax" is more like a "climactic patch" of acts widely separated geographically and in specific intent (a Hostage Rescue team action to rescue a scientist kidnapped by the KGB, a submarine-based infiltration of Cardinal to extricate a defector's family, a raid by Afghan rebels across the Soviet border to wreak havoc on a missile defense research site, etc.). Putting it another way, rather than the threads coming together, Clancy wrapped up the threads separately, their only connection even at the close the broader superpower competition that is the book's concern. And as if that were not enough Ryan is not even physically near the more action movie-type stuff, with his bit in his own part of things fairly un-action hero-like in comparison with the gunplay and other feats of the other books. As a fairly forgiving reader of this kind of narrative I thought it passable, but the hard fact of the matter is that this simply will not work as the big finish of a major feature film, and transforming the narrative into something that will satisfy would, again, change the material out of all recognition.

3. Where, again, the diffuseness of the story of Cardinal makes it hard to say just how much or how little it would have mattered, the story included an element that in the '90s was already looking troublesome, namely a traitor within the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative who was a lesbian, and indeed initiated such a relationship with another character whom she betrayed in the process. That was already enough to cause a backlash (as that other '90s hit, Basic Instinct, showed.)--while the fires of "culture war" were burning ever-hotter, and Clancy, if not so freely expressing his opinions as he would in later books, was still a well-known political conservative in the social as well as other spheres. Some people would be very mad indeed if that element of the plot was left in, while other people would also get mad if it was cut out--and accuse the producers of "caving in" to "political correctness." (Indeed, it would be interesting to know if this particular aspect of the story came up in that failed adaptation process of which we know so little--and what Clancy had to say about it.)

Moreover, great as all of these difficulties already were in the ‘90s they only became greater in the years after, with the Cold War increasingly remote (it was not long before young people didn’t even know what it was); with perceptions of Afghanistan and its recent history changing radically in the U.S. in ways very awkward for proponents of the Cold Warrior/neoconservative perspective in particular; with the blockbuster taking on ever more stereotyped and bombastic form into which any unconventionality of structure required for a recognizable adaptation of Clancy’s tale was ever less likely to fit; and politics just went on becoming ever more sensitized to and obsessed with popular culture, such that it could quickly have got to be "too hot to handle." Still, I do wonder about one detail of the film that was reported at the time--namely that the movie would have seen Harrison Ford teamed up with William Shatner. I very much doubt that even in that decade in which pop culture so often choked on its own irony the backers of the movie had any intention of making a Jack Ryan tale as an action-comedy (I just can’t see Clancy agreeing to this)--but the idea of a movie about "Star Wars" starring Han Solo and Captain Kirk together could still have been something memorable that way.*

Or at least, given us the makings of a really great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

Is Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor Even Filmable Today?

Even in the 1980s, when Clancy was the bestselling writer in the country Hollywood was skeptical about the salability of a film based on the material given the problems of translating it to the screen, and the changing political context. This was not wholly without reason. In spite of Clancy's insistence that he has a "very visual style," what he offers are information-heavy, mostly "tell don't show" thrillers that leave much of their interest behind in any attempt at conversion into a series of images per the literary ideal of Gustave Flaubert. (When it comes to the technology, we just get the big external effects, not the subtleties, with screen-based storytelling. Someone pushes a button, something explodes--we don't know much else. Alas, much of the interest of a Tom Clancy novel lies in its enabling us to understand the "much else.") The narratives also tend to be sprawling in such a way as to guarantee massive paring down into a two-hour film which keeps the protagonist mostly on screen. Moreover, the Cold War in which his books were rooted drew to a close far faster than mainstream observers imagined, with The Hunt for Red October--the rights to which were actually purchased in 1984 when the book was still in galley form, before it hit print, before its run as a bestseller--appearing on screen only in February 1990, with the Berlin Wall down and the Warsaw Pact passing out of existence (compelling the filmmakers' to casually backdate events to November 1984).

As it happened, the movie, if not necessarily translating everything that drew readers to Clancy's novels (given the above, I doubt any popular movie can), still worked well enough as a thriller to be a box office hit, and spawn two big-screen sequels in a mere four years' time. However, it is notable that after moving from Red October to its prequel Patriot Games, the producers then overleaped the next book in the sequence, the Cold War-rooted The Cardinal of the Kremlin, to seize on the more topical Clear and Present Danger--and then when trying with Cardinal afterward failed to make it work.

It was a reminder then that the scenarios with which Clancy worked--quite naturally, given the "ripped from the headlines" or "tomorrow's headline today" interest of the techno-thriller genre--tends to date fast, with 2023 seeing not only the Cold War dated, but the "post-Cold War" too, to which Debt of Honor most certainly belonged. Here, the corpse of the Soviet Union was barely cold, and Japan was looking like possibly America's next geopolitical rival, the more in as so many national loyalties were in flux, with the tale seeing the U.S. and Japan fight a war as the U.S. Navy gets in a confrontation with the fleet of an India that, like China, is secretly aligned with it. I might add that rather than this being a one-novel premise it was the start of a three-book arc that saw the U.S. confront, and defeat, the three Asian powers, as well as an expansionist Iran-Iraq, all which climaxed with a NATO-China battle in 2000's The Bear and the Dragon that ultimately saw the West embrace Russia as a fellow NATO member and (as is usually the case in this kind of World War III fantasy) the enemy regime collapse, putting another nail in the coffin of Communism and locking in the era of cheerfully globalizing unipolarity so taken for granted then as the only foreseeable future.

Today mainstream opinion, however, far from fearing what Japan might do there is more concern about what it might not do--the American press hailing Japanese rearmament for the sake of contributing to the balance of the U.S.-led alliance, while India is aligned with the U.S. against China rather than the other way around (to the point that it had the benefit of American satellite imagery in real-time in the latest Indo-Chinese border clash, which are "a thing" again), all as Russia, and China, are discussed together in such terms that one would think Nixon had never made his proverbial trip. (Oh, and by the way that Iran-Iraq combination occurred in Clancy's book because Iran had a deep-cover agent in Saddam Hussein's circle who killed him, opening the way for the union of the two countries, in stark contrast with the events of our own timeline.)

Indeed, at this point, as history repeats itself in the form of a farce that could nonetheless end as tragedy, I suspect that amid the current "neo-Cold War" mood The Cardinal of the Kremlin scenario that looked so dated in the '90s now actually looks less dated than the later Debt of Honor does. And as if all that were not enough, there is the book's big twist, namely the circumstances which see Jack Ryan--National Security Adviser at the book's start--catapulted to the Presidency by the tale's last page. At the time they were received as silly thriller stuff but they can now appear redolent with echoes of twenty-first century American traumas (a vengeful foreigner hijacking an airliner and using it to attack Washington D.C., an attack on the Capitol during the rituals of presidential succession) in a manner that will very easily rub everyone the wrong way if treated as just "silly thriller stuff."

But cut that out and you will have very little left--and Hollywood knows it, which is why Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and the Jack Ryan TV series used brand-new scenarios rather than anything Clancy wrote, while Without Remorse was profoundly changed (the story brought up fifty years, with the organized crime and Vietnam POW themes abandoned in favor of Syria, Russia and a Beltway conspiracy). In all this I am reminded of the prolific adaptation of another writer--Ian Fleming. While the '60s-era Bond films, if far from perfectly faithful to the source material, at least incorporated a good deal of it, by the time of 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me there was nearly nothing left of Fleming's novels but the title when they hit the screen. So is it likely to go with any Debt of Honor movie that does happen, any agonizing over how they will "update" the plot pointless.

Adapting Tom Clancy

Today Tom Clancy is such a multimedia success--indeed, so known by his success in media (video gaming, television, film) outside the one in which he began (print)--that it is easy to forget just how unlikely his becoming so seemed in the '80s, even when he was topping the bestseller list. Where all that is concerned it is worth recalling the Los Angeles Times' article about the challenge Clancy and Hollywood collaborators of his such as Mace Neufeld and John Milius faced getting the Jack Ryan franchise going.

While I have never had a high estimate of the average level of intelligence in Hollywood, and especially its studio executives, reading this article it seems to me that, as the article conveys it, they at least understood the difficulties of translating Clancy’s material into a hit film pretty. Besides the very understandable, and ultimately correct, sense that the Cold War was waning with all that implied for the interest of such stories, which did indeed start to plummet with the fall of the Berlin Wall as the bestseller lists show , there was the sheer scale of the stories--the author of the article noting that the studios recognized that Red Storm Rising could be the basis of a mini-series (and a lavish one at that), but not a movie, while the same tendency was evident, if in lesser degree, in most of the Jack Ryan books, if one tried to be at all faithful to their scope and intricacy. There was the extent to which much of what made the books interesting to their readers could not be incorporated into any screen action story--the intricate construction of the narrative out of numerous threads, subplots, viewpoint characters that would get cut down for any two-hour film, all the technical detail that would fall by the wayside as, rendered visually rather than by way of the written word, it just becomes people looking at screens and pushing buttons and things exploding. And just as translation to the screen would likely discard their strengths it would highlight their weaknesses--along with the diffuseness of those narratives, their emotional slightness. To use the Goethe-Schiller conception, these narratives are "epic" rather than "dramatic," and conventionally it is the dramatic that filmmakers endeavor to offer. (Even action movies tell us that "This time, it's personal"--even if only because someone killed the hero's favorite second cousin, and that's a big mistake, and, and save for Patriot Games, which was in its way the least Clancy-ish of the early novels, there was just not much of that driving Ryan's actions, at least.)

There was also what it would all cost.

In the period when Hollywood was first thinking about making films out of Clancy's work it was still common for the studios to fund major summer releases--a Commando, an Aliens, a Robocop, a Lethal Weapon--at $10-$20 million, a sum that, even adjusted for inflation, still seems paltry today, some $30-$60 million, as against the $150 million and up, often way up, expected today. (Indeed, by today's standard they fall into that middle range which is too expensive for little indies, but too small for the tastes of most backers.) This was a long way from being enough to make a film version of The Hunt for Red October look credible on the big screen.

So what happened? Well, if it took longer than many hoped Clancy was a sufficiently big phenomenon, apparently with enough sympathy from Hollywood's "players," for The Hunt for Red October to get its chance, Paramount making the movie with a blockbuster budget and getting it into theaters in February 1990. That was not a typical release date for a blockbuster, but it meant that the Cold War, if already fast passing (the Berlin Wall came down four months earlier), remained a strong enough presence for a little backdating to suffice at smoothing over its rapid obsolescence (the story presented as a bit of secret history taken place in November 1984 rather than a contemporary tale). It was also the case that there was just not much box office competition for a movie like this at the time (since Hollywood hadn't yet made summer movies play all year long).

The movie was not just a hit, but the fifth-highest grossing movie of the year (notably outdoing such highly anticipated summer action movies as Die Hard 2 and Total Recall), and sequels followed in due course, two in a mere four years (Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), all as other techno-thrillers filled up the screen--movies like Under Siege, and Crimson Tide, and Broken Arrow, and Executive Decision, and Air Force One, extending and encouraging the fashion, which I think happened because of several ongoing developments that may have played a part in getting Red October made in the first place. By and large this was a matter of the scaling up of the action movie, which meant that if $10-$20 million got you a summer move in the mid-'80s even a couple of years later studios expected to, and did, lay out much more--$50 million budgets becoming the norm by 1989 with films like Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 3. There was, too, a detectable sense that the '80s-era approach to such movies was not working so well as before, that making them "go bigger" was not making them better--as one sees in the over-the-top quality of, for example, Rambo III, or Tango & Cash, or Die Hard 2, all of which have their fans but all of which some saw as just "too much," and which did not make so much more money than their predecessors as to justify the extra money sunk into them. (Rambo III, in fact, left that franchise moribund for years, while Tango & Cash and Die Hard 2 were also seen as not all that had been hoped for.) However, the techno-thriller with its military hardware and geopolitical plots seemed to leave some room for usefully “going bigger.” And so it went for a while, until Hollywood ran short on conveniently adaptable material (The Cardinal of the Kremlin was not easy to work with, Red Storm Rising a non-starter, the side story of Without Remorse a tricky proposition, etc.), Clancy's star sank, and the action movie was increasingly colonized by "still bigger" sci-fi themes anyway. Armageddon was the champion in the summer of 1998, the return of Star Wars to the screen the champion in 1999, while if it did not dominate the year the comparative success of the first X-Men initiated a renewed fashion for big-budget, first-string superhero films that made the successes of Superman in 1978 and Batman in 1989 look like flashes in the pan, the boom really getting going now--while we are still there, as Jack Ryan thrillers, far from representing the scaling up of the blockbuster, have come to seem comparatively limited productions, with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Without Remorse no head-liners, and for the time being Ryan most successful in a streaming TV series. Of course, we now hear reports of Debt of Honor being made as a feature film--but any attempt to render it faithfully will pit the writers against perhaps insuperable obstacles as they face a different generation's challenges in producing a satisfactory adaptation of his material.

Are the Superhero Movies of Today in the Same Place as the Musicals of the Late '60s?

When we look into the history of the film of the 1960s we are apt to be regaled with tales of the edgy New Hollywood, stressing its countercultural impulses and its artistic experimentalism and its radical politics and its generally avant garde, edgier, racier material.

One would never guess from such writing that the biggest box office hit of the decade was . . . The Sound of Music.

One would also never guess that this success did not come out of nowhere--or end with it. After all, the studios, trying to compete with TV, went in for Panavision-Technicolor spectacle, with the choice of content favoring the historical epic (usually Biblical or early Roman Empire, or World War II, though with a sprinkling of Westerns and Medieval adventure), and the splashy, often Broadway hit-derived musical, and steadily "going bigger" in the process. Of course, they were not long in hitting a limit. The colossal Cleopatra (which cost $31 million to produce, and another $13 million to market and distribute), was budget-busting even by today's standards, and even as the biggest moneymaker of its year (1963) regarded as an underperformer. That result, along with that on Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire the following year (a $16 million production that made back a lot less than that), pretty much marked the end of the readiness to back big historical epics.* But The Sound of Music (1965) suggested musicals were still worthwhile, and sheer box office earnings encouraged the studios to pour ever more money into such projects--like Camelot, Oliver!, and in 1969, Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, and Hello, Dolly!

The results varied commercially, as well as artistically, but people did see them. In fact, Paint Your Wagon and Hello, Dolly! were among their year's top ten hits. The problem was that so much money had been poured into them, and the expectations that drove such open-handedness were so high, that, like Cleopatra, even being fair-sized hits they were deemed disappointments that helped end the long-running fashion, and even more certainly the scaling up so long evident. Of course, for all that Hollywood has never stopped making musicals, and even scoring significant hits with them (Fiddler on the Roof, Grease, Chicago). However, I think it safe to say that the genre never recovered its fecundity, or place at the box office, the really new but old-style musical a rarity--while if some musicals do become big money-makers commercially the genre, save for the occasional big animated film, rarely become really first-rank hits. Indeed, these days, thinking of a likely hit we are likely to think not of the musical genre but the big splashy sci-fi action movie, and especially the superhero movie, which seems to me in similar territory these days as the musicals were in back in the '60s. The studios, hard-pressed to get people away from their newfangled gadgets and counting on ever-more spectacular films from a very short list of genres to do it, keep pouring ever-more money into colossal films of the type--productions so big that they can only be justified by extraordinary expectations that consistently lead to serious disappointment (the DC Extended Universe, almost all of Marvel after Phase Three, etc., etc.), so much so that it might not take much more disappointment to make the game appear to be no longer worth the candle.

Of course, as the predominance of the old musical waned other genres were emergent. In a reminder that the Hollywood executives of a half century ago were probably not much more intelligent than those of today they proved very slow indeed to catch on to the potential of the action film--and in one of the greater ironies of film history's more recent decades, it actually fell to a Godard-loving auteur theory-minded film school graduated upstart to make them appreciate it. But if any new genre promises sufficient theatrical draw to keep Hollywood viable along anything like its current lines is emergent the fact would seem to have escaped everyone, such that I would not bet on some latterday George Lucas supplying the Suits with another basis for building a hit factory.

* Adjusted for inflation the production budget for Cleopatra comes to $300 million (with distribution and promotion costing another $120 million).

The Post-War Commercial Predominance of the Historical Epic and the Musical: 1949-1966

Looking back I think we forget just how big a force at the box office historical epics and big splashy musicals were in that period between the onset of the decline of the studios in the late 1940s (as TV emerged, etc.), and the arrival of the "New Hollywood" in the 1960s. Going by Wikipedia's listings the eighteen year 1949-1966 period, a historical epic (most often Biblical-Roman, or World War II-based), or a musical (most of which were also period pieces), was the #1 movie at the North American box office for sixteen years--Jolson Sings Again in 1949, Samson and Delilah in 1950, Quo Vadis in 1951, The Robe in 1953, White Christmas in 1954, The Ten Commandments in 1956, The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, South Pacific in 1958, Ben-Hur in 1959, Spartacus in 1960, West Side Story in 1961, The Longest Day in 1962, Cleopatra in 1963, Mary Poppins in 1964, The Sound of Music in 1965, Hawaii in 1966.

By contrast a period piece has not held the #1 spot at the North American box office since Pirates of the Caribbean 2 in 2006, before which one could (at least discounting Agrabah, Middle Earth, Far Far Away and Arendelle as not actually part of history, and Back to the Future as only partly set in the past and not really about that past) only accord that status to Saving Private Ryan in 1998, Titanic in 1997, Forrest Gump in 1994, Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and Grease in 1978--a mere five occasions in the past forty-six years, three of them in one highly anomalous mid-to-late '90s patch. Meanwhile, at least discounting animated movies, Grease was the last time that a live-action musical has been its year's highest-grosser (which is to say that this has not happened in the lifetime of most Americans).

All of this, of course, reflects a broader popularity, which had the list of the top ten earning movies of any given year saturated with hits of those genres, including such Biblical/Roman epics as David and Bathsheba, Salome and King of Kings; period pieces with other themes (besides the aforementioned matter of World War II, Westerns and the occasional mainly Medieval adventure) like How the West Was Won, Ivanhoe, The Vikings and El Cid; and in the musical category, 1954's A Star is Born, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, There's No Business Like Show Business, Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Auntie Mame, The Music Man, My Fair Lady and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

These days, plentiful as they can sometimes seem, musicals very rarely break into the top ten, with 2018--a year particularly rich in such hits--a good example. Four such movies ranked among the top 25 films of the year--the seemingly five millionth remake of A Star is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Greatest Showman and Mamma Mia 2--but not one of them actually made the top ten, with the most successful, A Star is Born, making only the #12 spot.* Moreover, it is striking how many of our big musicals are, especially when they are not remakes of past hits (like A Star is Born or West Side Story), or similarly backward looking in some way (as with Bohemian Rhapsody and Mamma Mia 2, both of which ultimately depend on the continued popularity of singers, acts and hits of decades ago, Queen and ABBA in these two cases), take on a different shape--as with, again, Disney-type cartoons (like Frozen), or apt to be plain and simple curiosities (like the upcoming Joker 2).

It all bespeaks a very different market indeed--in which sci-fi/fantasy exotica has displaced the exotica of past eras, and the choreography of the action sequence the choreography of the song and dance routine, with both exemplified by the predominance of speculative fiction-themed adventure, and above all, the superhero genre that has been its most consistently successful variation.

* Granted, Bohemian Rhapsody did better globally, making the #6 spot and almost becoming a billion-dollar hit in the process--but this was an extreme outlier, as shown by how A Star is Born, now the second-biggest musical hit of the year, got knocked down to the #21 spot and The Greatest Showman fell out of the top 25.

Deadline and the Five Biggest Box Office Failures of 2022: Some Thoughts

When it comes to talk of "hits" and "flops," of "blockbusters" and "bombs," even those of us who bother to consult the data regarding the financial performance of particular films usually have to make do with just a few of the relevant numbers--namely reported production budgets, and box office grosses. Just how much money a studio actually shelled out to get a movie made (as against how much was carried by government subsidy and product placement), just how much it cost to distribute and promote the movie, how much of the gross the studio got after divvying it up with distributors, what it made from other revenue streams (like video, or merchandising), are not consistently available to us.

For that reason when considering the issue I go by the (admittedly very conservative) rule of thumb that a movie which did not make at least 4-5 times its production budget is at least susceptible to the charge that it did not break even on the theatrical run, which is likely to imply that, even with all the rest counted in it just did not do terribly well (because home video is no substitute for ticket sales, because people do not buy much merchandise for flops, etc.). This is not always the case, of course--studios sometimes having a movie's cost covered before it even starts shooting through early sales of key rights, or subsidies and product placement pick up a big part of the tab, or they get a bigger than usual share of the theatrical revenue, or other revenue streams prove unusually strong. Sometimes the mechanics of all this actually prove very different from the conventional operation of the movies. (Pixar's Cars movies are not its biggest successes--but given the colossal merchandise sales even if they were just expensive ads for the $10 billion in product they moved by 2011 alone they would have been well worthwhile.) Still, most of the time it seems to me to give a fairly good idea of a "worst-case" scenario, which is my concern here.

Deadline, however, publishes its own estimates for some of the more conspicuous hits and misses each year--apparently culled from various sources and perhaps incomplete but at least something more comprehensive with an eye to giving us the five most and five least profitable films of the annum. The news site skipped out on doing so in 2020 and 2021 when movie earnings were so battered that the exercise seemed pointless, but it has returned to its practice, doing so again for 2022.

According to its listing the five biggest "box office bombs" of 2022 were (I should think, to no one's surprise) Strange World, Amsterdam, Lightyear, Devotion and Babylon.

It seems notable that all five of the films fit into two distinct patterns.

Two of those films (Strange World and Lightyear) are big-budget Disney animated productions that can seem conventional enough in offering science-fiction adventure to a family audience, but going about it in a less-than-expected way more likely to please a hardcore audience than the general audience. (They made Buzz Lightyear an action hero in a straight adventure film rather than a comedic figure--voiced by Captain America instead of Tim the Toolman Taylor, no less! Meanwhile Strange World offered the kind of involved premise and retro aesthetic that makes for a cult following rather than a general audience hit.) They also stirred a lot of controversy--of the kind that does more harm than good--through their prominent LGBTQ+ "representation."

The other three films (Amsterdam, Devotion, Babylon), pointedly aimed at adults rather than families, are all lavish period pieces set between the 1920s and 1950s and generally dealing with themes that have historically not been successful with American audiences, while unlikely to do better overseas (Silent Era Hollywood, the Korean War--while David O. Russell's trying to make another American Hustle out of the events surrounding the Business Plot seem a long shot).

Within this set of three films two conformed to another, more specific pattern --specifically Russell's Amsterdam and David Chazelle's Babylon. Charges of competence or incompetence aside the essential handling of the material was unlikely to appeal to a big audience (Amsterdam studiedly "offbeat," Babylon frequently deliberately repellent), while at least two of the films would seem to have cost much more than they ought to have done (Amsterdam's budget certainly ballooning, the production of Babylon perhaps having seen something similar). It all suggests the combination of a lot of money with the independent movie sensibility that their writer-directors of independent film roots have displayed in the past--indeed, suggests big money combined with much of the worst of the indie sensibility. (Certainly David Walsh's review of Amsterdam characterizes it as full of "oddball characters . . . lack[ing] any special purpose or sharpness," with the star's performance "a series of irritating quirks"; the film more broadly as having a feel of "[a]morphousness, muddiness," comprised as it is of scenes that go nowhere between individuals whose motives are unclear and for the most part uninteresting," even with weighty, timely material at the center of things. Walsh's colleague Joannie Laurier wrote of Babylon as murky" and" "lack[ing] . . . substance and cohesiveness," even while being "crude, vulgar . . . cartoonish" as it characterizes "everything and everyone in the worst possible light." This looks edgy, but in actuality presents only the most conventional, even reactionary, critique, bespeaking a "demoralized . . . disoriented" perspective given over to "postmodern subjectivism" that prefers the simplicities of myth to the complexity of a reality that is a "closed book" to such filmmakers. Yup, pure independent all the way.)

As they let these indie film-makers run wild with big budgets in this way the producers would seem to have bet heavily on star power and critical acclaim to turn a profit, or at least not lose very much. Alas, as anyone who has been paying attention knows, star power does not deliver the way it used to (with Margot Robbie, who is about as close as any performer who made her name in recent years gets to being a star, getting black marks on her record from both films), while certainly the critical acclaim never came for either Amsterdam or Babylon.

I suspect that in that there is an irony--that when a formula-addicted Hollywood fails miserably it does even that in the most wearisomely formulaic way.

The Box Office for Shazam 2 and Ant-Man 3: An Update

Not so long ago I wrote here, after Shazam 2's opening weekend, that the movie might fall short of $80 million domestic and $200 million global--and thought myself pessimistic for doing so.

Right now that prediction looks wildly optimistic.

After four weeks in theaters in North America Shazam 2 has pulled in a mere $57 million--below the $60 million, never mind the $80 million mark.

Globally the situation has not been much better. Adding a mere $71 million to its take after being out in just about all the major markets for the same period (China included), the overseas drop is proving even sharper than the domestic one.

That would leaving it with less than $130 million at last count and not much further to go, which would be not quite one-third the adjusted-for-inflation gross of the none-too-stellar (frankly, marginal) original Shazam. Not only virtually guaranteeing it a spot in any list of the year's biggest money-losers, it is another black eye for the DC Universe that, even with a much-publicized overhaul in the works, could scarcely afford another blow.

At the same time Ant-Man 3 in its ninth weekend, is not even in the top ten films, but down to #22, and took in a mere $44,000, suggesting that it will top out at a mere $213 million domestically--while maybe not making $480 million globally.

All of this underlines just how badly these films have done--with the fact the more pointed given how, proving one cannot simply see their underperformance as a matter of some general box office-dampening effect, given that, even if the box office is not yet back to normal (the first three months this year saw $1.7 billion in ticket sales, as against the billion a month expected pre-pandemic), many other franchise films enjoyed robust grosses during the same time frame, including John Wick 4 and Creed 3 (meeting a more modest standard, but all the same, meeting it), and now the genuine blockbuster that is the new The Super Mario Bros. Movie. With nearly $350 million banked domestically (and approaching twice that globally), after a mere twelve days in theaters, it is the top-grossing release of 2023. And while it may not retain the title for much longer with the summer film season coming up fast, it is far from impossible that this, and not Guardians of the Galaxy 3, will be Chris Pratt's top-grossing film of the year.

If so, it would be yet another blow to not just the Marvel brand, but the ever more tired-looking superhero film genre as a whole, with still more pain locked into the schedule given just how much more MCU the public has coming its way. After all, with Phase 5's debut not making the half billion dollar mark, and the Guardians sequel failing to provide an overdue lift, what chance does a Kraven the Hunter movie have, even were it to have the makings of a hit? Or for that matter that subsequent MCU movie in which so much more is being invested, The Marvels?

What Can We Expect for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 at the Box Office?

Once again a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel is due that first weekend of May generally regarded as the start of the summer box office race.

How is it likely to do?

Considering that let us start with its predecessors. Put into 2022 dollars the take for the first (2013) Guardians would come to $970 million or so (with a 43/57 percent domestic/foreign split), and that for Guardians 2 (2017) about $1.03 billion (with a 45/55 domestic/foreign split). The result is that they averaged about $1 billion in today's terms--if with a bit of a bump between the first and second films, mainly on the domestic side (the film's earnings surging from $420 to almost $470 million here, as foreign sales held more or less steady in the $550-$570 million range).

Based on that one might expect the movie to make another billion or so, and maybe even a little more than that, given the promise of a trilogy being rounded out and positive reaction to the trailers. Still, audience responsiveness to the MCU has been eroding, with Ant-Man 3, well, looking very disappointing indeed, falling short not just of the billion dollars optimists were so clearly expecting, but even the half billion dollar mark the two preceding films cleared with ease (even in current dollars, never mind real terms), with the underperformance at home more than matched by what was seen internationally (the principal reason for the box office shortfall). It would seem complacent to think this means nothing for Guardians--the more in as it is just not clear that audiences are terribly excited about this one, whether one goes by "initial pre-sales . . . currently trending below all post-Endgame releases other than Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings," or the "social media impact" of pre-release marketing.

The result is that, while I do not rule out the movie's delivering Marvel's first billion dollar take since Spider-Man: No Way Home, I would not be shocked if Guardians was the lowest-grossing film in the Guardians trilogy, especially overseas--or even if it fell a similar way from a similar height. Were it to see proportional erosion of its domestic gross as Ant-Man 3 it would finish up with $400 million, while its international gross falling in the same fashion as it did in the case of Ant-Man 3 would leave it with perhaps $300 million more internationally, making for a $700 million take--a figure the easier to picture because it would put its gross roughly on a level with those of Thor 4 and Black Panther 2, likewise movies that would be considered colossal hits by any standard but at best underwhelming given the expectations associated with their budgets and the Marvel brand. Moreover, some are offering more pessimistic estimates, with the $400 million I suggest as Guardians' domestic gross here already the lowest real-terms take for the Guardians movie (about 5 percent down from the first movie's gross, and almost 15 percent down from the second movie's) actually the high end of the range anticipated by Boxoffice Pro. The lower end of their range has it failing to make the $300 million mark domestically--while one could expect the international gross to likewise suffer in such a scenario, leaving the movie with a good deal less than $700 million.

Should this come to pass this would spell real trouble for Marvel, not only with another high-cost disappointment, but what this means in a year in which Guardians was the studio's best chance to revive confidence in what seems ever more a formerly mighty brand in decline.

Is a Debt of Honor Movie Really a Good Idea? Considering the Clancy Brand Name

In considering the idea of a Debt of Honor movie from a commercial point of view one might as well start with the brand Hollywood is cashing in on with its Ryanverse products--the Tom Clancy name.

That name's heyday, clearly, was the '80s, when Tom Clancy was the highest-selling American novelist of his decade, with two of his novels the bestselling book of the year in two consecutive years (The Cardinal of the Kremlin in 1988, Clear and Present Danger in 1989), and the second of them the bestselling novel of the whole decade, while his star was only slightly dimmed during the '90s. However, that changed pretty quickly after the turn of the century--after which Clancy's output, which was the more prolific for the then-vast output of other "co-authored" books, fiction and nonfiction that he produced, halted in the early years of the next century (with the last of the original run 2003's The Teeth of the Tiger).

Of course, the Ryan books continue with the help of co-authors Grant Blackwood, Mark Greaney, Peter Telep, and others, and they seem to have had their audience. (You can find them on the paperback rack at the supermarket or in the convenience store.) Still, that leaves them a long way from the peak of Clancy's bestsellerdom--perhaps just another franchise on auto-pilot cashing in on the readiness of a dwindling base of fans left over from the boom times to have the same old stuff served up for them one more time. After all, the audience for print action thrillers collapsed in the '90s--the paperback Mack Bolan-type adventures, the hardback Robert Ludlum-style shoot 'em ups, and certainly the military techno-thrillers that from the start were hugely atypical for popular fiction in a way that likely contributed to their especially sharp decline. (In spite of the pieties that people who never write a word love to spout about "good fiction" being character fiction first, last and always, character, Character, CHARACTER! until it is coming out of your ears, most of the stuff on the racks is not really strong on character, as either subject or driver of events. But it does tend to at least focus on a character as it presents an easy-to-follow read, whereas techno-thrillers like Clancy's were so often sprawling, big-picture stuff, full of subplots and minor viewpoint characters there just to show some key bit of the action, and in a "Jack Ryan" novel Ryan himself is apt to get lost from view for long stretches amid all that. Indeed, I could add that the books could often be a "slow burn" in their long build-ups, were prone to be information-heavy, and often quite impersonal and dry for many tastes.)

All this seems the more the case given that it does not seem that many are picking up the older Clancy novels these days. On Goodreads, it seems, Debt of Honor has 47,000 ratings--given prior use of the site to assess these things, about what I would expect for a bestseller of that time that no one picks up much in the Internet era. Which, again, is what I would expect even if the genre did not suffer such a decline, simply because the half-life of popular fiction tends to be so short, with, again, thriller fiction of all kinds particularly suffering. (For example, how many read Robert Ludlum today--especially anything but The Bourne Identity because they saw the movies? From what I can tell, very few indeed.)

Of course, if the print Ryanverse has to all evidences seen its star fall a long way the franchise continues to exist in other media. The films made from Clancy's books were generally judged hits--but how has interest in them held up? It does not seem unfair to say that Alec Baldwin was deemed dispensable after The Hunt for Red October, and that Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan is a long way from Han Solo or Indiana Jones in cultural cachet. Moreover, since The Sum of All Fears in 2002, after which no one saw fit to give Ben Affleck another "go" at the character, we have had two decades in which we have seen only two major feature films based on Clancy's work, namely 2015's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (which ended up a lower-budgeted January dump month release), and 2021's Without Remorse (which went straight to streaming amid the pandemic). In spite of having cast relatively well-liked leads (Chris Pine isn't usually regarded as the worst Chris, and the press usually loves Michael B. Jordan), they do not seem to have been hits, or left much impression, all as Jack Ryan was relegated to the small screen (and is now played by that guy from The Office who always stared at the camera with that insufferably smug expression on his face). The show has presumably done fairly well there, but all the same it is not a shift of that incarnation of the character from the small screen to the big they are talking about--just as they are not trying to capitalize on the strength of the Clancy name where it may be most prominent, gaming, as they might have with a Ghost Recon or Splinter Cell movie, but, apparently, resurrecting Ford's 90s-era Ryan.

The result is that Ford, more than Clancy, is the name of importance here--the wisdom of which decision remains to be seen. People may still be up for seeing Ford play Indiana Jones, if only out of nostalgia--this, in fact, seems to me one of the few things that Indiana Jones 5 has in its favor--but Ford is less closely identified with Ryan than that figure, that draw just not nearly as strong. Moreover, even with Jones we will see it tested when Dial of Destiny hits theaters this June. Should that movie not do so well as hoped--and it seems to me that between the colossal budget and the many strikes against it there is a good chance it will be seen as less than a roaring success--we may see Hollywood's enthusiasm for this project cool off in a hurry.