Mission: Impossible's Place in Pop Culture in 2023--and What it Means for the Series' Fortunes

At this point it has been over a quarter of a century since the first big-screen Mission: Impossible hit theaters (back in 1996). At the time the film was a characteristically '90s exercise in nostalgia--like The Addams Family and The Fugitive and The Flintstones milking the public's hazy recollections of '60s TV to sell tickets, largely to young people who had never seen the original, and probably would not have liked the old thing much if they had--or liked the new thing if they had liked the old.* (Greg Morris, who played Barney Collier on the original show during its seven year run, walked out of a viewing of the 1996 movie and called it an "abomination"--understandably, I think, given what the film did to the original cast of characters.) Indeed, it seems to say something of the slightness of the connection of the film with the show that the movie "borrowed" its most famous scene not from the show but from the entirely unrelated Topkapi (though according to the story I read, at least, Mr. Morris did not stick around long enough to catch that).**

Now the movie franchise has been around for so long that any nostalgia for the original show is long gone--and the movie series putting out new films on the basis of audience familiarity not with the show but with the earlier movies as it endlessly repeats the same tired clichés. (Thus does the Impossible Mission Force become convinced Ethan Hunt is a traitor and forced him to go on the run to stop the bad guys and clear his name in a repeat of the premise of John Buchan's century-old The Thirty-Nine Steps over and over and over again.)

For twenty-seven years.

Considering the span of time that passed between the release of the first Mission: Impossible film and 2023's Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning: Part One I find myself thinking of the twenty-year seven passage between two films in another iconic '60s-era spy-themed action-adventure series, the one that did so much to create the fashion in which Mission: Impossible became a hit--the EON-produced James Bond movies. Twenty-seven years after the James Bond film series' debut we got Licence to Kill in the summer of 1989--in many respects a low point for the series, from the standpoint of commercial cachet, and even its own identity. (The series' runners had coped with declining interest in Bond for decades through frenzied trend-chasing, and the 1989 movie ended up looking more like a big-but-generic '80s drug-dealers-killed-my-favorite-second-cousin thriller than a Bond movie.)

Of course, the latest film in the Mission: Impossible series seems to enjoy more regard from both critics and audiences than Licence to Kill did to go by its Rotten Tomatoes score. Still, that audience is a long way from what it had been at the franchise's start, when the first two movies were, in 2023 dollars, $350 million+ hits in the North American market. Mission: Impossible III, which came out a long six years after the second film, suffered horribly because of the stupid furor over Tom Cruise's stupid couch-jumping, and if the series recovered partially five years later, its draw in America has just never been the same--and its continuation ever more dependent on its foreign grosses, without the burgeoning of which, in large part because of a strong reception in China, it would have ceased to be commercially worthwhile long ago. Now with even the foreign grosses faltering alongside the American (again, I doubt the movie will approach the $200 million mark domestically, leaving it the new low for the series), I doubt that even the most franchise-addicted of the Hollywood Suits will rush to greenlight a continuation. Part Two of Dead Reckoning will still come out of course--but barring a miracle the financial disappointment (and very likely, loss) seems likely to mean that Mission: Impossible 9 will not be coming soon to any theater near you.

But there will probably eventually be a "reboot," because these days there always is, assuming Hollywood-as-we-know-it endures for a few years past next summer.

* Notably this was not the first attempt to cash in on the franchise, ABC airing a revival that ran for 35 episodes over two seasons in October 1988-February 1990.
** This is, of course, the famous heist sequence, taken from the earlier 1964 film, which was an adaptation of Eric Ambler's classic thriller The Light of Day--which I suspect just about everyone these days was invented for the film, just as few realize the bit with the baby carriage in Brian de Palma's prior TV-show-turned-film The Untouchables was swiped from Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.

What Will the Success of "Barbenheim" Mean for Hollywood? Thoughts After the Second Weekend

After a summer of failures--failures on a large-scale that have been so severe and so numerous as to call into question the whole model of commercial filmmaking on which Hollywood has increasingly relied for a near half-century--the big studios have finally had indisputable and major commercial success with live-action films in the boffo b.o. they racked up in the opening (and second) weekends for Oppenheimer and Barbie.*

However, it is hard to see where the business goes from here.

However high the box office goes for these two films (and for now, Barbie looks likely to be the highest-grossing live-action film of the summer, and perhaps 2023) neither suggests a plausible model for hit-making. Meanwhile anyone hoping that the successes of Nolan and Gerwig will restore the auteur and their visions to a New Hollywood-like stature should remember that the studios, whose attitude toward the "creatives" is expressed in their desire to make the writers literally homeless before imposing on them a doubtless Carthaginian peace, and in the meantime have gone on a "hiring spree" for artificial intelligence specialists. None of this bespeaks any interest in writers and directors getting a freer hand with their work--and in fact I will not expect to see it in the years ahead.

Will Barbie Make a Billion Dollars at the Box Office?

Earlier this year, looking at the roaring success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, I wondered if it would be the only billion-dollar hit of 2023--on account of no live-action film seeming likely to do such business.

Of course, at the time I was mainly thinking about the usual blockbusters--superhero films and such, with this validated for the most part. (Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and much more, The Flash, certainly disappointed that way--as has Indiana Jones, while Fast X and the latest Transformers film did not exceed the low expectations held for them.)

Barbie was not really on my radar. I knew the movie was coming, but was unsure of what to make of it as a box office prospect. (Greta Gerwig has up to now been a maker of small critics' darling films rather than big blockbusters, the little I knew about the movie suggested something far outside the mold of the usual summer blockbuster, I was not sure how well it would travel internationally, etc..) A hit it might be, but a $1 billion+ hit in 2023? I had seen nothing to indicate that, and I suppose neither did anyone else going by the way Boxoffice Pro's tracking shifted very late in the game.

The publication's first projection had Barbie making just $55-$85 million in its opening weekend and topping out in the vicinity of $225 million at best when all was said and done--far from the makings of a billion dollar hit. It was only later, with the figure surging from week to week that they came to anticipate twice their original projection just before its release.

Moreover, their heightened expectation proved correct, with the film pulling in $162 million in its first three days. Assuming a typical front-loaded blockbuster profile one would expect that to account for 40 percent of the total, suggesting a final gross in the $400 million range, though there now seem expectations of much more--not least because, thanks to an excellent second weekend hold for such a big movie (the second Friday-to-Sunday period gross falling a mere 43 percent from that of the first weekend), it has already blasted past the $350 million mark in its first ten days.

Meanwhile the film has had a strong response overseas, taking in at least half its money there, raising the global total to the vicinity of $750 million--again, just ten days on. Should this pattern continue as the film approaches the half billion dollar mark in North America then the movie can be expected to cross the $1 billion mark, and fairly soon, on the way to some point well past that. The result is that in a few weeks 2023 may well have had a billion-dollar live-action Hollywood hit--just not from among the usual suspects.

* The two movies in question were Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2.

Will Greta Gerwig's Barbie Be the Highest-Grossing Live-Action Film of 2023 in North America?

Greta Gerwig's Barbie grossed $162 million in its opening weekend in North America. Once upon a time a merely respectable sum for a major blockbuster (even last year two Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that broke $180 million were thought to have done less well than hoped), it has been the best three-day performance of 2023 so far, and (even if the claquing for Gerwig and her movie and all associated with them has been nothing short of thunderous) not unreasonably seen as sensational.*

This contributed to Barbie taking in $258 million domestically in its first seven day period, while it has in its second weekend displayed surprisingly good legs for a movie that opened so big so late in the summer. (Boxoffice Pro expected a 45 percent drop from the first weekend to the second; instead it has managed an even better 43 percent.)

Adding up to a $351 million take in its first ten days, Barbie has almost matched the entire domestic run of the highest-grossing live-action movie of the year, Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Imagining, cautiously, that the movie has only made three-fifths or so of its domestic gross to date, one can imagine it blasting past the $500 million mark--well past it. Should holds like the one seen this past weekend continue, $600 million+ would not be out of the question.

The result is that the year could easily see the competition for the #1 spot come down to either Barbie or The Super Mario Bros. Movie as the #1 film--both toys today's adults played with as kids conquered the box office from the superheroes, for 2023 at least.

I am sure cultural commentators of a certain type will have a field day with that idea.

A Surprising Positive Review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

The film critic David Walsh has reviewed for his publication Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Dunkirk (2017) and Nolan's last, Tenet (2021).

During that nearly two decade period, during which the rest of the critical community has been consistently breathless in its praises for anything and everything Nolan does, Walsh has been consistently, strongly, negative in his appraisal of Nolan's work. I might add that as the reviews of the Batman films and Dunkirk in particular indicate, Walsh was particularly unimpressed with the films' handling of political and historical themes--exactly what happen to be at the heart of Oppenheimer.

The result was that I expected that, if Walsh reviewed the film their appraisal would be an utter evisceration of the film--even before the reviews of the movie were in, and certainly after I read what Mark Hughes had to say of the film's deficiencies (as he read them).

Instead Walsh, in a review--co-written with J. Cooper--offers very high praise of the film in what seems to me the most surprising review of his that I have ever read.

While Walsh and his colleague acknowledge the film's "genuine weaknesses" (in this case not the usual complaints about the sex, but rather the handling of the history that most critics cannot be bothered with, like the ways in which a biographical approach clashes with a historical one), Oppenheimer is in their view "a serious and appropriately disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war" telling an "engrossing story" that "is intended to leave viewers shaken, and . . . succeeds in that" as a film with a real critical edge, and real force. Indeed, in an extreme contrast with Hughes' view of the film, and Walsh's view of Nolan's earlier works, the review remarks Nolan's "treating many of the weighty historical issues contained in Robert Oppenheimer's life with sincerity and urgency" --all as, testifying to some artistry here, the filmmaker managed to make a movie "quite pointed" about "the horrors of nuclear weapons and the threat they represent to humanity" while "eschew[ing] didacticism." Particularly astonishing in a director so often associated with the right (not least because of that third Batman film, in which, as Walsh's colleague Adam Haig put it in his review of that movie, Nolan "defends plutocracy, associates the working class with violent murderers and thugs, identifies revolution with terrorism" in a "condescending, cruel, misanthropic, ugly and unreal" piece of "artistic and social falseness and pseudo-gravitas"), this review specifically commends Nolan for "treat[ing] honestly" the "scenes of left-wing intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s."

Thus: after dispraise for the film where I had not expected it (from a Nolan fan writing for a mainstream publication), praise where I had not expected it (from a reviewer who has been anything but a Nolan fan, from a publication whose editorial line has been consistently critical of Nolan and the politics associated with him).

At the very least the movie is garnering surprising reactions from serious critics who have followed Nolan's work for a long time. And if nothing else there seems to me something to be said for that, while it may well be that, whatever Oppenheimer's limitations, to go by the reviews of both Hughes and Walsh, Nolan is doing that very, very rare thing among those to whom the box office and the critics have been so consistently and profusely good for so long--stretching himself as an artist, however one regards the result.

Mission: Impossible 7's Second Weekend at the Box Office: How Did the Movie Do?

Boxoffice Pro estimated that Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning, Part One would see its Friday-to-Sunday gross fall 53 percent from the first weekend to the second, working out to a $26 million take over the weekend and $126 million in the till as of Sunday.

Instead the movie suffered a 64 percent drop, working out to a $20 million second weekend and a total of $119 million so far.

By comparison the last Mission: Impossible film, Mission: Impossible--Fallout--had, as of its second weekend, $129 million, and as of its twelfth day in release (a Tuesday, as it came out on a Friday in contrast with the Wednesday release of Mission: Impossible 7), $134 million.
The result is that the movie may be characterized as running between 9 and 11 percent behind Mission: Impossible 6 at this point.

Mission: Impossible 6 ultimately grossed 59 percent of its total in its first ten days in release, and 61 percent of its total in its first twelve. Applied to Mission: Impossible 7 this would leave the movie (again) making just $200 million in North America--while the movie's faster fade at the box office (Fallout's holds were far better, the first-to-second weekend drop just 42 percent) suggests much weaker legs, and thus a higher proportion of all the money it is likely to make in its domestic run already collected. The result is that I expect the movie will finish its domestic run short of the $200 million mark (which, again, would make it a series low in real terms), though how far short remains to be seen.

Accordingly that much more will depend on the film's international take bottom line-wise. So far the film is taking in a smaller proportion of its total overseas than its predecessor--the split 32/68. Unless this gets better $700 million, never mind the $850 million I earlier expected, remains well out of reach.

"Just how much has the rough competition of the weekend of 'Barbenheimer' contributed to the drop?" some are doubtless wondering.

Obviously it did not help, but it also did not hurt very much. The truth is that franchise films like this one have been disappointing at the box office all summer--in fact, after decades of box office-watching I can't remember a single summer that saw so many big movies crash and burn like this (Fast and Furious, Transformers, The Flash, Indiana Jones)--and the falling expectations for Mission: Impossible 7 in the weeks before release, followed by its disappointing opening weekend, were no exception to the trend. Its prospects would probably not have been all that bright even in a weekend of ordinary summer competition. After all, Barbie and Oppenheimer are not competing blockbusters of similar type, but the "counter-programming," catering to fairly different audiences underserved by the usual run of summer fare--such that I suspect few of the people who went to them would have bothered to catch Dead Reckoning instead.

No, instead of blaming unusually strong competition this should be seen as another instance of the increasingly strong pattern of aged, over-the-hill franchises and their sequels that no one asked for being rejected by the audience that didn't ask for them--though admittedly that is something of which neither Barbie, nor Oppenheimer, can be accused.

Oppenheimer's First Weekend at the Box Office

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer now looks to finish its run with about $80 million grossed domestically in its first three days.

Even the conventional superhero and animated spectacle tentpoles are lucky to do that well these days--which makes the gross extraordinary for a movie that is not just a historical biography about a scientist set in the 1940s and 1950s, but a "weirdo" postmodernist art film. (Think of it this way: its three-day take matched the take of Mission: Impossible 7 in its first five days of release.)

Still, I am curious to see how the movie does in its second weekend--and if it has not left a significant share of ticket-buyers disappointed or worse. We will learn more about that in the coming weeks.

How Will Blue Beetle Do? (A Note on the Boxoffice Pro's Tracking)

These days even the biggest movies from the bigger franchises are having a tough time getting audiences to the theaters--and smaller movies having a tougher time still. Thus Guardians of the Galaxy 3 disappoints (finishing up a fifth down from the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 when we adjust for inflation), while Shazam 2 craters (this $100 million+ DCEU superhero movie finishing with $134 million taken in globally).

Blue Beetle was an originally straight-to-streaming release "upgraded" with a bigger budget in the wake of its studio's declining interest in costly streaming projects that saw them decide to bury a nearly complete Batgirl film rather than give it the same treatment.

Still, from the standpoint of resources invested and name recognition the movie was more Shazam than Guardians of the Galaxy (never mind Spider-Man).

All the same, catching Blue Beetle's trailer a while back I thought it at least promised a fast, flashy, fun summer movie. (Indeed, it made a better impression that way than the contemporaneous Captain Marvel 2 trailer.)

Was it possible that Blue Beetle would defy the odds? Not necessarily becoming a billion-dollar hit, but still being a meaningful success on a smaller scale?

Alas, to go by Boxoffice Pro's projection Blue Beetle will be lucky to do as well as Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Their analyst Shawn Robbins anticipates a $12-$17 million opening on the way to a $27-$55 million gross at the end of its domestic run.

Shazam 2, by contrast, opened with $30 million--far above the high end of the range projected for Blue Beetle--on its way to a $58 million gross even after its collapse in the second weekend.

Of course, Blue Beetle will not actually hit theaters for four weeks, and a lot can change in that period. We have seen many a movie's tracking-based prospects wither in that time frame (in fact this has happened again and again this year, perhaps most pointedly The Flash), but sometimes their prospects improve--with this weekend's Barbie an excellent example. (A month ago Boxoffice Pro was thinking the movie's first three days might take in as little as $55 million. Now the range they have in mind is two-and-a-half to three times that, $140-$175 million.) Still, whether or not the film lives up to this promise the more likely outcome is its confirming the impressions so many of superhero fatigue and the commercial pointlessness of putting out smaller films of that kind.

Expect an update on that during the coming weeks.

Captain Marvel 2's Prospects: Revisiting the Box Office Prediction

The new trailer for The Marvels is out.

My thoughts: in contrast with the prior trailer, which frankly made the movie look a bit cheap, and may have overemphasized the element of goofy comedy, the new one makes The Marvels at least look the part of a big-budget CGI-packed Marvel Cinematic Universe adventure.

Of course, I had thought this would probably happen soon enough (especially given the talk of the film's release's delay having had to do at least in part with the desire to get the FX right), so this does not change things much from what I expected back in early May.

Rather what has changed is my image of the American box office's condition (and the world's as well). Late last year my thought was that 2023 would see the box office more or less return to its pre-pandemic norm, and this was confirmed by the first four months of the year as the box office take improved significantly over the same period back in 2022. However, instead of this summer continuing that improvement the summer of 2023's first two months actually saw a drop compared with that of 2022, so that the box office has been moving further away from the pre-pandemic norm rather than closing the gap with it.

Putting it simply, this summer has indeed been crowded with tentpoles--but audiences have rejected them, with this year's installments in the biggest franchises underperforming again and again (Fast and Furious, Transformers, even Indiana Jones), with superhero films not exempt (The Flash). Meanwhile salvation has not been forthcoming from the international markets (with China, in particular, ever less receptive to Hollywood's products).

Of course, there is a counter-argument in Captain Marvel 2's case. Admittedly Marvel has not escaped the more general trend toward lower grosses by any means, with Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and especially Ant-Man 3 doing much less well than their predecessors. Still, if Phase Four was disappointing (even more so than was publicly known, it seemed, given the recent revelations about how Dr. Strange 2 really did), only Ant-Man 3 looks like a genuine flop, with this substantially a matter of its performance in China, while Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if not wholly bucking the trend, is still a hit by just about any standard by Marvel's (and indeed, the second-biggest hit of the year as of July, after only The Super Mario Bros. Movie).* This suggests that Marvel, if looking ever further away from its Phase Three peak, is at least a more robust contender than the competition (which has done a lot worse), and should not be counted out too hastily. Indeed, should Captain Marvel 2 suffer only a Guardians of the Galaxy 3-like drop in its theatrical gross when compared with its predecessor it would still be a $1 billion hit--perhaps the only such non-animated film to achieve that distinction this year.**

Still, it is worth noting that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was saved by decent legs after a disappointing opening that raised the specter of its being another Ant-Man 3. This suggests that people's enthusiasm had been dimmed, while the film's good legs were probably at least in part a matter of surprisingly slight competition as all those other big summer movies failed to interest viewers, and they still left Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the weakest performer by a good way in a trilogy that was a long way from being Marvel's strongest performer. The result is that lot would have to go Captain Marvel 2's way for the film to be as fortunate in its commercial release--the more in as the film confronts so many headwinds. The result is that I am sticking with my expectation of $700 million as high as it is likely to go--while, as with Shazam 2, The Flash and Indiana Jones (and the upcoming Aquaman 2) I find myself increasingly wondering about the possibility of collapse.

* Adjusting mid-2017 (i.e. May 2017) prices for those of mid-2023 (May 2023) the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 comes to about $1.07 billion, versus the $850 million at which Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is topping out, leaving it a fifth down in real terms.
** Adjusting March 2019 prices for mid-2023 turns Captain Marvel's $1.1 billion gross into one of $1.35 billion today--20 percent off of which would still leave the movie with $1.08 billion.

Some Thoughts on the "Barbenheimer" Nonsense

Considering the summer's films here I have had little to say about either Barbie, or Oppenheimer--in large part because I have so much interested myself in films' box office prospects, and both those films lack the kind of reference points I usually really on in making my estimates. (Thinking about Indiana Jones 5 we could think about the other four Indiana Jones films--and we could think about, for example, Solo, which turned out to be more relevant. Considering this summer's Memorial Day weekend-released live action adaptation of a three decade-old Disney animated classic The Little Mermaid we could think about 2019's significantly parallel Aladdin--and watching the movie run out of steam before Aladdin could guess at how it would end up. And so forth. Nothing like that exists for Barbie, or Oppenheimer.)

Indeed, that the press has produced the silly portmanteau "Barbenheimer" out of the release of these two very unlike films says something.

Still, there seems something to be said about the pair.

Both, not being the most obvious blockbusters, were heavily promoted on the basis of the director's name and its associated critical cachet--Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan.

Both, if not spectacles of the CGI-packed action-adventure and splashy animated types to which we are accustomed at this time of year, still rely on visual novelty for their interest, be it the plastic-toys-come-to-life pink-saturated images of Barbie, or the IMAXed avant garde-filmmaking of Oppenheimer.

And both in their ways harken back to that mid-century period so critical in defining American social and political and cultural life, with a toy of the 1950s that was to be an icon of the era, and the birth of the atomic age.

The last seems to me especially significant--a reminder that even when a big Hollywood movie is not a sequel the glance remains decidedly backward.

Courtesy of Forbes: A Negative Review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

As anyone attentive to the press for the film is well aware, the critics and the entertainment press generally are in full claqueur mode where the subject of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer comes up.

This makes the more critical exceptions to the "Greatest Thing Ever!" adulation the more interesting--and surprisingly it is Forbes that brings us such an exception, by way of critic Mark Hughes.

While Hughes accounts himself a "huge fan" of Nolan's prior work, and (significant given its parallel with this film) specifically cites Dunkirk as "the filmmaker's greatest achievement to date," such that he expected to join the chorus singing its praises, he was not impressed with this film--and makes a formidable case for his position.

Basically what it comes to is the three-hour Oppenheimer, in spite of some great acting and some well-directed bits, being a pretentious, overstylized piece of postmodernist arthouse fare--fragmented, nonlinear, willfully dissonant and incoherent, and in its irony and superficiality, and the evasions and nihilism ultimately underlying them, taking up a weighty subject and then taking a very long time to say nothing about it at all. Indeed, Hughes likens what Oppenheimer offers to Nolan shooting three different movies about different parts of its protagonist's life at different stages of that life (Nolan's personal involvements with women, the work on the Manhattan Project, his later political troubles), each in a different tone and style and even political sensibility (!) and none of them adding up to much more than a "collage" of scenes that happened, and then chopping them up and mixing the bits together all out of order and connecting them with "clipped and jarring" editing "jumping . . . unequally and unpredictably" from one bit to another that has Hughes waxing poetic about the film perhaps being an artistic "distill[ation]" of quantum physics' conception of reality. Admittedly one might still hope to create something of interest through the juxtapositions such an approach can allow, but this is very, very difficult, and does not seem the case here, the assembly striking Hughes as random, while there is little sense of anything as more important than anything else (as seen in the "excessive" attention to Oppenheimer's romantic life that distracts from rather than complementing or cohering with his scientific work), and the "political sensibilities" are "all over the map," the film "represent[ing] one perspective only to shrug it off in favor of something else . . . while" denying it has any "perspective at all." The result is that in the end it does indeed seem a movie that "says very little, and means none of it" as it ultimately "abandon[s] any visionary search for higher meaning behind the processes of science or politics."

It made for what Hughes thought not only a "disappointing" and "underwhelming" film, but one that he "would have a tough time" just "sitting through . . . again."

Going by Hughes' assessment the film would seem to be all too consistent with earlier readings of the filmmaking of one who, as David Walsh put it, gave us a movie about "the outbreak of World War II without history or politics"; and confirmation of all my skepticism about the movie, and the critics, who even when they are not doing "Job One" by earning their pay as claqueurs, so often show themselves to be Midcult-consuming middlebrows.

Of course, the claqueurs/middlebrows of the entertainment media are one thing, the general public another. As we saw in their failing to excite the general public about The Flash (at this point, an indisputable, catastrophic flop) their applause does not always infect the wider audience as hoped, which is now having its say. Will Nolan's postmodernist three hour art movie that takes up the life of Robert Oppenheimer and the events in which he was involved and turns it into "a movie about nothing" really please the crowds, and they tell all their friends to see it too? Or will those who are not hardcore middlebrows who say they like what cultural Authorities tell them they are supposed to like but just drawn in by vague notions of something special and fondness for Nolan's more popular projects walk away disgusted? We will see this weekend--and of course, the next weekend too, the first-to-second weekend hold more than usually interesting this time around.

About Those Oppenheimer Posters . . .

A little while ago I discussed here my views of Christopher Nolan's strengths and weaknesses that left me with low expectations for his highly touted new film Oppenheimer.

The poster did not allay those suspicions.

After all, Nolan has shown himself to be exceedingly "conventional" in his views--and where science and engineering are concerned that conventional perspective imagines science as wizardry, and scientists as summoners, or even gods--a false way of looking at the matter, the more in as it is usually reduced to a summoner or god rather than many. That the film is based on and presented as a "biography" (where, as A.J.P. Taylor wrote, instead of history's putting society first, the writer "builds up his individual subject until society is almost forgotten") makes me suspect this will be all the more the case here--reducing that extraordinary example of Big Science, the "Manhattan Project," to the doings of one man.

The poster in which Oppenheimer is seen standing amid the blast of an apparent nuclear explosion would seem to confirm this evil-creation-of-a-god image. The later poster, in which Cillian Murphy stands in front of what looks like a big bomb with an even more than usually creepy expression on his lean, vaguely otherworldly face, confirms it yet again, in its way more powerfully. And frankly this nonsense is the last thing we need right now as the problems raised by the deficiencies of public and even elite understanding of science and technology--of science as method, and of how things actually get invented and made--seem the more pressing by the day; and amid great power conflict, the threat of nuclear war resurges horribly.

That fashionable commentators ignore that as they gabble about the hyping of artificial intelligence only underlines the fact.

Mission: Impossible 7 (Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning, Part One)--What Does its Opening Weekend Gross Tell Us About its Longer-Run Prospects?

I previously made an estimate of Mission: Impossible 7's likely global box office gross. Working off of the grosses of past installments in the franchise, while taking into account Boxoffice Pro's tracking and the ways the market may have changed recently (with the usually strong market of China likely to kick in less, but Tom Cruise getting a bump from the success of Top Gun 2 elsewhere), I suggested $850-$950 million as the likely range for the global gross.

I made no prediction regarding the opening weekend, and certainly not the domestic opening weekend--but I did note Boxoffice Pro's initial estimate of $65-$80 million for the first three days of its run, and if Boxoffice Pro was quick in revising the figure downward, right before the opening weekend it still projected over $68 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period.

The movie actually made $56 million in the Friday-to-Sunday--and $80 million for the whole five-day period between the Wednesday release and Sunday (where as late as the preceding week Boxoffice Pro projected $100 million for the first five days).

It is a significant shortfall--about 30 percent below the earlier estimate's ceiling, and 14 percent below its floor, while the five-day take is a rough fifth down from the pre-weekend estimate.

Moreover, it is plausible that the opening weekend shortfall will translate to a commensurate shortfall over its longer run. Where Boxoffice Pro had the film making about four times its initial Friday-to-Sunday gross over the whole run, which gave it $250-$320 million domestically, quadrupling what the movie actually made would give it about $225 million. It is also easy to see this assumption of unusually good legs as optimistic. The immediately prior films have managed more like 3.6 times their opening weekend gross, which from a start of $56 million would work out to more like $200 million. This would put the movie on a level with the series low to date, Mission: Impossible III (the one that came out after the stupid fuss about Cruise's public couch-jumping). And the disappointing opening weekend numbers may hint at the film doing still less well. Should it merely triple its opening weekend gross over the longer run (as with the by-today's-lowered-standard-pretty-good performance of Guardians of the Galaxy 3) it would end up with a mere $170 million in the till.

Of course, the Mission: Impossible series has long depended on the international markets for its profitability. Still, even assuming the movie does relatively as well there as Mission: Impossible--Fallout, the movie will just multiply the domestic gross by a factor of 3.6 (funny how that number comes up here too) such an expectation could prove overoptimistic given how film franchises very well-received in China in the past (the MCU, Fast and Furious, Transformers) have recently done, with Mission: Impossible 7's performance here so far no exception. (Thus far the movie has collected a mere $31 million in China, as against the spectacular $181 million it made back in 2018, even before we think of inflation.) If we think more in terms of how Mission: Impossible 4 (which had respectable but still more restrained foreign numbers, in part because of a more modest boost from China), then the movie just triples its domestic gross. And for the time being the movie is doing less well than that, with a 35/65 domestic/foreign split--which is to say, a global multiplier of 2.8.

So where does that leave us?

My guess as to the domestic range is now $170-$225 million, with the multiplier for the global take in the 2.8-3.6 range. Rounding to the nearest $50 million that works out to a global range of $500-$800 million. The high end of that range (just a bit below the floor on my earlier guess) would not be too bad, especially if people came away from the film looking forward to Part 2 of "Dead Reckoning." But anything much below it would likely be a real problem for yet another post-COVID movie that saw its budget bloated by delays, inflation and interest rates as the box office softened, with it seeming to say something that Deadline has drawn a comparison between it and what is looking like the unmitigated financial catastrophe of Indiana Jones 5.

The result is that while the second weekend is always important in clarifying how a movie is likely to do in the end Mission: Impossible 7's weaker than hoped for start in a shaky market, and the particularly high expectations that come with a near-billion dollar franchise and a near-$300 million production budget, make it even more than usually so.

Expect a follow-up after the numbers for this weekend are in.

Indiana Jones 5's Third Weekend in Theaters

For the third weekend in a row Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has fallen short of Boxoffice Pro's projection for it. Expected to take in $14.6 million it actually picked up $12.3 million for a total of $144 million after seventeen days in release. With a week-to-week drop of 59 percent in the first two full weeks these stronger-than-expected drops, should they continue, imply the movie's not making it much past $160 million, with $180 million a relatively optimistic figure. Meanwhile the movie's overseas performance is not looking like any source of salvation--in contrast with the prior films, let alone the pattern of the Fast and Furious or Transformers-style manner that might alone have afforded a real rescue of the movie from flop status, it is only making slightly more money internationally than domestically (with the domestic/international split 48/52, not quite a tenth more). Should this remain the case then my guess is that the movie will end up with a global take in the $330-$370 million range.

Once again I look back to April and think of how I wondered if I was not doom-mongering in suggesting a comparison between Indiana Jones and Solo. Now there would probably be relief if the film did as well as Solo, which pulled in a whole $393 million back in 2018, five inflationary years ago.

What Will Aquaman 2 Make? A Box Office Prediction

In considering what the final DCEU film, Aquaman 2, may make later this year one can find a basis for guesses in analogies with other comparable films--and application of these to what might be expected for it on the basis of the original Aquaman.

An obvious starting point is how major superhero franchise films have been doing lately--with and without the China market over which so many question marks hang (and which was so important to the first Aquaman movie's success).

At one end of the spectrum Guardians of the Galaxy 2 made $864 million at the global box office--which comes to $1.07 billion in May 2023 dollars. Without China's $100 million in ticket sales it comes to more like $948 million.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is likely to finish up with not much less than the original in current dollars--about $850 million. Without China the figure is more like $763 million. The result is that the film's gross is, in China's absence, about a fifth down, and this the best any such movie seems likely to do these days.

At the other end of the spectrum Black Panther 2 made just over half (53 percent) of what the original Black Panther did in real terms. Exclusion from China was a factor, but even when we set China aside the movie still made just 58 percent of what the original did.

So let us assume that in the best-case scenario the movie makes 80 percent of what the original did outside China, in the worst-case scenario, just 60 percent.

Meanwhile let us consider the film's prospects in China. In the worst case the film will not come out there at all, but should it come out one may take the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man franchises as suggestive of the range. In China Guardians of the Galaxy 3 did, if less well than elsewhere, relatively well by the standards of Hollywood in China these days, taking in 70 percent of what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did. By contrast Ant-Man 3 took in just 30 percent of what Ant-Man 2 did there.

In May 2023 dollars Aquaman took in $1.04 billion outside China. It also took in $350 million in China, for a take of nearly $1.4 billion overall.

The most positive scenario, with 80 percent of the non-China gross, and 70 percent of the China gross, of the original, would come to a $1.09 billion total take (less than a quarter down from the original's gross).

The least positive scenario within the range discussed here would come to more like $730 million (scarcely half what the original made).

Round for the nearest fifty million, and you end up with a range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, with, splitting the difference, somewhere around $900 million the middle of the range.

If a significant comedown from what might have been hoped from the strength of the original's reception, this would probably be the best gross of any superhero movie, or any live-action movie, this year. However, just as this kind of calculation was (as I warned back in April and as has since been amply confirmed) overoptimistic in the case of Indiana Jones 5 (which conventionally should have been a safe bet for a billion-dollar gross given the performance of prior entries in the series), given the headwinds it faced (which have all too clearly mattered), so it may be with Aquaman 2--given very poor buzz about the quality of the film, the way the DCEU seems to be going less than gracefully, the poor impression made by the overhyping and the disappointing reception of The Flash. Indeed, just as I warned about the possibility of a Solo-like collapse on the part of Indiana Jones 5, so does it seem worth warning about the possibility of a similar collapse in the case of Aquaman 2. Just as Indiana Jones 5 now looks like it will struggle to make forty percent of what might have been normally expected for it (and Aquaman 2's preceding DCEU universe, The Flash, looks as if it is doing the same) Aquaman 2, instead of the circa $900 million that could be expected for it amid the lowered expectations of today's global box office, could likewise find itself falling short of the half billion dollar mark, and even the $400 million mark.

To sum up: in May 2023 dollars, a likely range of $750 million-$1.1 billion, $900 million as the figure I think most likely assuming a "normal" run, with, not to be forgotten, a real prospect of collapse seeing it make less than half that (<$400 million) in these not-so-normal times.

Indiana Jones 5's Second Weekend Box Office Gross

Looking at Boxoffice Pro's estimate for the second weekend take of Indiana Jones 5 (a 53 percent drop to $28.6 million) I thought their figures overoptimistic--and indeed they were. But not by much. With a 56 percent drop and $26.5 million collected this weekend the gross was down only 7 percent from their prediction--leaving Indiana Jones with $121 million grossed domestically in its first ten days. On that level, at least, the film has avoided the kind of first-to-second weekend collapse seen with films like Ant-Man 3 (70 percent) or The Flash (73 percent) but, apart from the indignity of already having been knocked down to #2 at the box office (and that not by another blockbuster but a low-cost horror movie), at the same time proved itself far from leggy (to return to the analogy some drew, no Top Gun 2, and not even a Guardians of the Galaxy 3).*

It will be a long road toward $200 million domestically--too long, I think. (Guardians of the Galaxy-like legs--an extra two-thirds above its ten day take--would let it get there. Ant-Man 3-like legs over the longer haul--just a quarter more--would give it more like $150 million. For now my guess is the movie's ending up somewhere in between, if a little closer to Guardians. Call it about what it would get if the week-to-week drops held to 50 percent, $180 million.) Meanwhile, in contrast with the 40/60 domestic/foreign split on the prior Indiana Jones films the movie's take is currently more like 49/51 percent. (Extrapolating from the $180 million figure it would end up with $370 million or so.)

Still, even if the film does a good deal better than that it would be far from profitable--the anticipation of a Solo-like (or worse) collapse still dismayingly borne out.

* Top Gun 2 saw its Friday-to-Sunday gross slide a mere 29 percent, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 48 percent, from its first to its second weekend.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse's Sixth Weekend: The Movie Becomes the #1 Superhero Film of 2023 at the North American Box Office

Ant-Man 3, Shazam 2 and The Flash all flopped hard this year, making it easy enough for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to blast right past them on its way up the year's box office charts. Now it has, coming four weeks after Guardians of the Galaxy, managed to nose ahead of it, with $357,648,000 in the till as against Guardians' $357,577,000.

Expect Spider-Man, which pulled in $8 million this past weekend (as against Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $1 million), to continue extending its lead, perhaps by a considerable margin. Where Guardians of the Galaxy 3, after displaying impressive staying power, especially in later weeks, seems bound to sputter out just a little north of $360 million, Spider-Man seems a safe bet for the vicinity of $380 million even in the event of week-to-week drops in the range of 50 percent--and should the drops be more like those of last week's 30.5 percent, get up near $400 million before finishing out.

Especially given the shaky prospects of Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2 later this year it seems to me the movie has a pretty good chance of still holding the #1 crown at the end of the year in the domestic market (though in the international market, where Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has taken in almost 70 percent more than Spider-Man, Star-Lord and friends will still have that title).

* As of this past weekend Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had grossed $482 million internationally, as against Spider-Man's $284 million--interest in that movie not quite catching internationally the way it did domestically (even if the gross there, too, is still an improvement over that of the first animated Spider-Man movie).

Indiana Jones 5's First Five Days in Release--and the Upcoming Weekend

As noted here Indiana Jones 5 has had its debut--taking in some $60 million domestically during its first three days, and perhaps $84 million over the first five.

Speculating about the movie's course from here on out one can consider the extremes. Top Gun 2 saw a mere 29 percent drop from its first Friday-to-Sunday period to its second--an extremely rare performance for any major film, but especially for a highly anticipated sequel coming out on a major holiday weekend. By contrast The Flash (while not even coming off a holiday weekend) saw a 73 percent drop.

Boxoffice Pro currently expects the film's performance to fall almost exactly midway between the two extremes, with a 53 percent drop from the first Friday-to-Sunday period to the second, giving it $29 million this coming weekend and boosting its domestic total to nearly $126 million.

This would really not be bad, relatively speaking--almost as good as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had after its debut (a mere 48 percent drop from a non-holiday weekend). Still, even if the movie managed Guardians of the Galaxy 3 legs and roughly tripled its opening weekend gross this would mean just $180 million in the till. If, going by the first ten days rather than the first weekend, we assumed that the film, like Guardians, managed to make an extra two-thirds atop its $126 million take it would still end up with just $210 million--scarcely touching the low end of the already downwardly revised long-range projection the folks at Boxoffice Pro had offered down to the opening weekend ($211 million).

What about the overseas picture? The last two Indiana Jones films managed a roughly 40/60 domestic/international split, which would work out to a global gross of over a half billion in the circumstances ($525 million). However, the film's first three days saw it take in $70 million internationally, which works out to a rough 46/54 percent domestic/foreign split for the period. In combination with the $210 million domestic total this works out to $450-$460 million taken in globally.

Once more, that is about what Solo made in inflation-adjusted terms. And this is in a relatively optimistic scenario of very decent legs at home and abroad. As I remarked, audiences may be kinder than the critics who saw it first (the situation is quite the reverse of what we saw with Indiana Jones 4 at present), and the competition in the coming weeks is not too strong by the season's usual standards, but we also know that this kind of film is very front-loaded, and that by and large it is depending on the fading nostalgia for the series, limiting its potential. The result is that I suspect that come next Sunday Boxoffice Pro's prediction will prove optimistic--and that even if it does not, barring the movie's legs being not merely Guardians of the Galaxy 3-like, but Top Gun-2 like, it will not make much difference to the film's final fate commercially.*

* Top Gun 2 pulled in 5.7 times its initial Friday-to-Sunday gross, which in the case of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny would work out to an unspectacular but respectable $340 million. Should this go along with the current domestic/foreign split it might have a chance of at least breaking even via revenue from home entertainment, etc.. (With $350 million+ from theatrical rentals, and the equivalent of another 80 percent+ of that from those other revenue streams, the intake would at least be within range of the $600 million that seems likely to be the lowest outlay on the total project going by the formula I discussed here.)

Is the Box Office Becoming More "Top-Heavy?"

To answer the question raised by the title of this post I looked at the data on Box Office Mojo for this century to determine the share of the year's box office gross accounted for by the ten highest-grossing films.

In the decade 2000-2009 they ranged between just over 23 and just under 27 percent of the total, and averaged 25 percent over the whole decade.

In 2010-2014 the take of the top ten movies ranged from 24 to just under 30 percent, with the average for the five-year period 27 percent.

In 2015-2019 the figure, never lower than 31.7 percent (in 2017), averaged 34 percent, dragged up by how in 2019 it ran 38.5 percent.

Of course, the two years after that (2020, 2021) were so chaotic that it was hard to get much sense out of the numbers, but in that year of comparative recovery, 2022, the proportion was higher still, the top ten movies accounting for 52 percent of the total--more than twice as much as in the decade of the '00s ($3.85 billion of the $7.37 billion taken in).

And in 2023 so far the top ten have accounted for an even higher 59 percent of the total box office gross ($2.68 billion of the $4.51 billion collected at last count).

The result is that it seems indisputable that there was a trend toward a more top-heavy box office clearly underway over the twenty-first century's second decade, and especially after 2015, with the pandemic seeming to give it another boost--as, perhaps, it got people out of the habit of going to the theater for anything but the most "must-see" release. Moreover, there seems little sign of the trend reversing, or even slowing, any time soon.

How Much Money Will Indiana Jones 5 Lose Disney?

We are hearing $295 million as the price tag for producing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Given that the total outlay on a film's production, distribution and promotion tends to run two to three times its production budget it seems reasonable to think the complete bill for this already colossal but much-delayed and heavily hyped production will run to $600-$900 million.

Of course, with the film barely out it is harder to make guesses about revenue--but given its opening weekend it seems unlikely to do much better than a half billion dollars, and could easily take in just $400 million (or even less). Assume (optimistically) the studio gets half that $400 million figure--$200 million. Now consider the home entertainment/TV/streaming revenue. At this level movies rarely match their theatrical grosses through these sources, but even in the event that the film achieves that--making another $200 million here--the movie ends up with some $400 million, as against that $600-$900 million outlay. The result is that a shortfall in the $200 million+ range is far from inconceivable, even if the movie avoids a worst-case outcome.

And in the worst-case outcome . . . we could be talking about twice that or more. (After all, $900 million-$400 million=. . . I don't even want to finish that bit of arithemtic.)

All of this makes the movie a strong contender for Deadline's "biggest box office bombs" competition next year--but admittedly just one in what is already proving a field of very strong contenders for the title this year.

What About Indiana Jones' 5-Day Opening Weekend Gross?

The numbers are already in for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's opening weekend--a $60 million gross that would be deemed disappointing for any big Independence Day weekend release, never mind an installment in a classic Lucas-Spielberg saga.

But what about the prospects for the full five-day "weekend?"

Boxoffice Pro, which had down to the film's release anticipated its getting up near $94 million now has it doing not much better than $82 million--which seems to me unlikely to be the last downward revision of projections regarding the film.

Still, the film will have at least one chance to surprise the dismayed and dismaying--next week, when we will see how it holds up. Will good word of mouth offer at least partial compensation for a disappointing opening, the way it did for Guardians of the Galaxy 3? Or will the fall just continue, the way it has for The Flash?

Thoughts, readers?

Who's Watching Indiana Jones 5? (Hint: Old People)

While the press is overwhelmingly focused on the disappointing box office numbers the Boxoffice Pro analysis regarding Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's debut offers an interesting tidbit about the makeup of the dismayingly small portion of the moviegoing audience that did show up. As their report indicates, just "a quarter of the film’s opening weekend audience was under the age of 25," while "moviegoers above the age of 54" comprise "the title's largest age group with 21 percent of ticket sales."

Presenting my initial speculation about the likely misfire that is this film back in April I wrote that

I think Indy 5 will be the movie that reduces Indiana Jones from the tiny and ultra-exclusive club of "absolute, inarguable, classic, totally failure-proof franchise" to "just another movie franchise" (like Star Wars had become in 2017-2019) and maybe even "franchise old people see mainly out of nostalgia" (like the James Bond films have seemed to be, especially after the Waller-Bridge co-scripted No Time to Die[)].

It thus seems that, just as I had speculated, Indiana Jones 5, like No Time to Die, really is confirming the film series' hanging-on-out-of-nostalgia status--a fact that did not bode well for the Bond film, and also does not bode well for this film, which seems that much less likely to be saved by good legs at the box office as a result.

Indiana Jones 5 vs. Solo: the Opening Weekend Box Office Gross--and Beyond

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is presently said to be headed for a $60 million gross--at the bottom end of even the latest, much-lowered range projected by Boxoffice Pro.

At this point further comparisons with prior Indiana Jones films seem pointless. Let us compare the performance with the opening of the film that has been on my mind since I started thinking about Indiana Jones' box office prospects back in April, Solo: A Star Wars Story.

Solo took in $84 million back in 2018--which adjusted for inflation is equal to over $100 million in current prices. The result is that we are, so far, looking not at a Solo-like collapse, but something possibly worse here. Should Indiana Jones 5, like Solo, make about 2.5 times its opening gross domestically it will not much overtop $150 million, never mind the $211 million that Boxoffice Pro predicts as the low end of the range of the film's likely gross (and about the $214 million Solo made in current dollars, never mind the $260 million or so it made in inflation-adjusted, 2023 dollars).

Could Indiana Jones do better than that? There may seem some hope in the Rotten Tomatoes ratings--where the critics' ratings have edged upwards (to 68 percent), and the audience's ratings are more generous still (the "Verified" audience affording an 89 percent score, the "All Audience" score 81 percent), suggesting that many will have a more favorable view of the film than the crowd that got the first look at it at Cannes. The film may also benefit from surprisingly weak competition--the market packed this year not with hits but with flops, such that The Flash will not be much of a rival, while in what is an all too familiar pattern this year Boxoffice Pro is already downgrading its expectations for the next possible rival, Mission: Impossible 7. Still, it is not the launch that might have been hoped for, with very good legs required to get it merely to the $200 million mark, and even Top Gun 2-like endurance not quite getting it to $400 million--all as, again, I see little reason to expect a big boost from overseas. The result is that I think $200 million about as well as it is likely to do domestically, and given the 60/40 international/domestic split on prior Indiana Jones films, $300 million the best that can be reasonably hoped for there, working out to a half billion dollars as the likely ceiling for this one--as it happens, about what Solo did globally in 2023 dollars.

The Mounting List of Flops in the Summer of 2023

As it is already July it does not seem unreasonable to stop and consider the course of the box office this summer.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3, despite the deflation of expectations and a weaker-than-hoped-for debut, managed an $850 million global total--in real terms a decline from its predecessors, but a relatively better performance than the preceding Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and quite enough to make it one of the more profitable films of the year. Meanwhile the sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has nearly doubled the original film's domestic gross, while if the international audience is less enthusiastic it is still improving its totals on the first film there as well.

By contrast the other big movies of the summer seem to all be performing somewhere between badly and disastrously. Thus does it go with Fast X, Transformers, The Flash--each of which could well mean a nine-figure loss for their studio. And now Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is at this point performing no better.

Meanwhile, along with the big action movies the family-oriented animated films, and adaptations of animated films, are suffering--as seen with The Little Mermaid, Elemental, and now something called Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken as well.

Considering this let us allow that every summer has its flops. But the ratio of flops-to-successes, the severity of the flops (as with The Flash), and the qualified nature of such successes as we are seeing (Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is at the least an underperformer when graded on anything but a curve), is really something special, with the big-picture numbers confirming the fact. While this is the first summer since 2019 with a "normal" slate of films, when we adjust the grosses for inflation the overall domestic box office take for May and June is down not just from the 2015-2019 average, but the depressed level of last summer as well (reversing the upward trend seen in January-April).

No matter how loud the claqueurs claque they cannot conceal the fact that things are not going well--and I have little expectation of them getting better this season given that the summer has already given us its "best shot," while the prospects of the most promising movies coming out later this summer, and this year, seem either very finite (as with Mission: Impossible 7, about which Boxoffice Pro is already becoming less bullish), or very shaky indeed (as with Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2), with all this going for the foreign markets as for the United States.

Indeed, considering the situation I recall my suggestion in the first week of May that no live-action movie coming out this year will make a billion dollars. Right now I feel more confirmed in that assessment that ever--and its implications for the beleaguered film industry.

How Much Money Will The Flash Lose?

In a little over a month the media has gone from claquing for The Flash as the "greatest superhero movie ever" to accepting that it is a flop of historic proportions (reflected in its, in its third weekend, having just $99 million collected in North America, less than might have been hoped for in its first two days of release).

Now the question seems to be just how much money will be lost on this proposition.

Well, the formula is familiar enough.

Consider the reported budget--something on the order of $200 million. Double and triple that to get the range of the final bill for production, distribution, promotion.

You get $400 million to $600 million this way.

Now consider what the film seems likely to make at the box office. The prospect of $400 million seems to be receding in the distance, even $300 million. I personally can see it (given its possibly finishing around $110 million domestically and the current 40/60 domestic/international split) topping out somewhere around $275 million. Assume a fairly typical 48 percent goes in the till and you have $130 million or so in worldwide theatrical rentals.

Now what about home entertainment, etc.?

Big movies usually make somewhat less here than they do from theatrical revenues. Even 90 percent (which would work out to just under $120 million) is high. But given how poorly this one did at the box office it may make relatively more than usual there. Assume that it matches its theatrical take from those other sources. Or even does better--that it betters that by 50 percent (the way some small movies do).

You end up with maybe $250 million, at best something in the neighborhood of $300 million.

Against that you have the outlay of $400 million+ (and maybe much more).

The result is that even if the movie is a spectacular home entertainment performer (relative to its theatrical income) it will work out to a nine figure loss for the studio--$100 million, maybe $200 million. I would not even be shocked by a $300 million loss on this one movie.

This would guarantee it the top spot in Deadline's "biggest box office bombs" competition in just about any year but this one.

What Ever Happened to Transformers: Rise of the Beasts at the Box Office?

Back in early May I got in my two cents on Transformers: Rise of the Beasts' box office prospects. My guess, based on the performance of prior films in the once mighty but long declining franchise, and the reported tracking, was a range of $300-$450 million for the global take.

Of course, expectations regarding the film turned upward, and its opening weekend saw the movie overperform a bit--take in $61 million (where the predictions had figured mid-50s, tops). It was a win--but only a small one, as the somewhat stronger-than-expected opening was not followed by commensurately good holds, the decline afterward pretty typical for a front-loaded sequel. The drop from the first weekend to the second was 67 percent--and as of its fourth weekend had only $136 million grossed domestically.

Meanwhile the movie's overseas run was less sensational than for previous Transformers films. Where Transformers 4 and 5, and Bumblebee, tripled and quadrupled their domestic take internationally, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has not quite doubled it, such that the global total stands at well under $400 million at last check ($381 million), with not much further to go (Japan the last major market in which it as yet to open). As things stand I still expect it to finish well within the range I predicted, which seems to me a significant problem for a reported $200 million production--enough of one to possibly mean a major loss for its studio as, reportedly, it plans to proceed with the sequel.

The First Six Months of 2023 at the Box Office: Hollywood's Post-Pandemic Recovery Going into Reverse?

The first four months of 2023 showed a healthy increase in the domestic box office's total gross over the preceding year--$2.6 billion to $1.9 billion going by the Box Office Mojo data, which works out to a 30 percent boost even after adjustment of the component monthly figures for May 2023 prices. However, even just in current dollars the North American box office took in only marginally more in May and June 2023 ($1.777 billion according to the current, likely to be revised slightly upward figure) than it did in May-June 2022 ($1.755 billion), and, even on a generous adjustment of the figure (assuming zero inflation in June 2023), down at least two percent in real terms from the year.

In other words, recovery was quite evident in the first third of the year, with the first four months of 2023 seeing the box office take in 59 percent of the average for 2015-2019 in the same part of the year, and 64 percent of what was seen in the last "normal," pre-pandemic year of 2019 (as against 46 and 49 percent for the year before, respectively). However, so far this summer it has gone backward. Where the May-June box office in 2022 managed 68 percent of the 2015-2019 average for the same months, and 69 percent of the figure for 2019, in 2023 it has managed just 67 percent of the average for the five-year period, and of the 2019 level.*

I am sure that few expected the box office's recovery, after (if perhaps not going as fast as many would like) still proceeding strongly in the year's first third, going into reverse in the summer season. I certainly did not. Looking at last year's recovering-but-not-all-the-way-there box office my thought was that the summer's revenues reflected the relatively limited slate of films (just four big action movies rather than the usual eight, a fact which seemed to me critical in helping Top Gun 2 rack up its spectacular gross), and my guess was that this year's comparatively would-be-blockbuster-packed summer would complete the normalization, or near-normalization, of the market. But as the flops pile up it appears that this was overoptimistic--and evidence that the road back to profitability for Hollywood is longer and harder than widely appreciated.

It also raises two possibilities.

One is the pandemic's blow to Hollywood being harder than realized--as people continue to avoid theaters because they do not feel safe in them (perhaps to a greater degree than we realize; the media has much more interest in opposition to measures to contain the pandemic than the opposite), or moviegoing suffers for the permanent shutdown of so many theaters, or so many just falling out of the habit of going so they only come out for something really, really, really big.

The other is the extent to which Hollywood has problems besides the pandemic, and which preceded it (even if the pandemic accelerated them)--like its decreasing ability to entice people to the theater with anything but mega-budgeted brand name tentpoles, and the fact that the franchises on which it relies for those tentpoles are ever-more weary. (Putting it bluntly, the sequels and remakes that no one asked for keep coming, even as the audience's willingness to see them declines.) Meanwhile the fact that the consumer is now so hard-pressed--that, as strikes, strikes, strikes everywhere against a backdrop of skyrocketing prices for essentials (you know, like food and housing)--may make them the more hesitant to indulge in a night out at the movies rather than just watching streaming, or anything else, at home. (This, too, is likely a greater factor than appreciated--the media no more interested in consumers' responses to tough times than it is in those still concerned about the virus, least of all the claqueurs of the entertainment press.)

As we consider Hollywood's domestic woes we should also remember that this is a moment in which the international markets are not providing relief--in which, frankly, that biggest and most important piece of that market, China, is ever less lucrative for Hollywood, with a glance a one underperformer after another showing lackluster or worse Chinese ticket sales as a factor. (Ant-Man 3, which may have faded fast in North America but saw its biggest troubles in the international market, took a particularly big hit in China, without which its "flop" status would be a lot more disputed--and this has proven merely the beginning of a long train of disappointments this year, from Fast X to Transformers: Rise of the Beasts as the latest installments in franchises that normally do quite well there bring in disappointingly small amounts of cash.)

The result is that just as the weak grosses of the summer of 2023 (so far) ought not to be trivialized, one should also not trivialize what the summer means for the badly-battered American film industry.

* Even in current dollars Hollywood broke the $3 billion barrier in the year's first four months in every single year of the 2015-2019 period (and blew past $3.8 billion in 2018)--while breaking $4 billion when the figures are adjusted for May 2023 prices.

Is Fast X a Flop?

A little over two months after its world debut (it came out in Italy at the end of April), and over six weeks after its wider launch (in the U.S., China and other key markets), without much further to go, the Fast and Furious sequel Fast X is still short of the $700 million mark. (At last report it in fact had only $691 million grossed.)

The figure is notably lower than what the preceding F9 made during the pandemic-depressed year of 2021 in current dollars ($726 million), never mind inflation-adjusted real dollars ($820 million in May 2023 dollars)--by which measure it is 16 percent down. Compared with the series' last "normal" release, the eighth film The Fate of the Furious it is down by over half in real terms (that movie made $1.24 billion in 2017, equal to $1.54 billion today), and scarcely better than a third of what the franchise made at its peak with Fast Seven in 2015 (over $1.5 billion in real terms, and about $1.95 billion in May 2023 dollars).

The result is that, however much one tries to grade the film's performance on a curve ("Not every movie has to make a billion dollars!" goes the retort), the gross of Fast X has to be recognized as a significant comedown from past films in the franchise--and a problem given that it cost enough to make a $700 million gross a serious problem. With the film's budget reported as $340 million, my guess according to the formula I previously discussed is that even on the most optimistic calculation it needed $800 million+ before getting near the break-even point even after the home entertainment and other revenue streams are counted in, with a billion dollar gross likely a necessity.* (No, not every movie needs to make a billion dollars. But when they cost north of $300 million they don't make much sense as a financial proposition otherwise, and the studio bosses don't make these things for their or anyone else's health.)

Naturally I think the film has a shot at next year's Deadline list of "biggest box office bombs," except that competition is very, very intense here, with the even less well-performing Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash and other such films also in contention for spots.

Considering that I think Deadline should make the list longer--give us the list out to ten or even more places this year rather than the usual five, just as they do with the most profitable films. (Really, 2023, and especially the summer of 2023, is shaping up to be that bad.)

* Counting in, besides production, promotion and distribution all the way through home entertainment, TV, streaming, etc., a big-budget movie tends to cost its producers at least twice, and often three times, its production budget, giving us a figure in the range of $700 million to $1 billion in the case of a $340 million film. A movie making $700 million or so at the box office might see the equivalent of half that in theatrical rentals (48 percent seems typical these days, so call it $335 million), and perhaps the equivalent of 80-90 percent of that in the post-theatrical outlets, coming to another $240-$280 million or so. This works out to somewhere around $600 million, which can easily leave a nine-figure gap between what was spent and what came in in the form of revenue.