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.