Will Barbie Win Best Picture at this Year's Oscars?

It may seem premature to ask the question of this piece's title. After all, the year still has two months to go--with those last two months tending to be particularly rich in the sorts of critical darlings that usually take home little statuettes, the actual quality of which we can only speculate about as yet.

However, there is a politics to the Academy Awards that, just as it makes clear that some of those upcoming films will have their claims and their backers (Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Ava Duvernay's Origin, Blitz Bazawule's The Color Purple, and conventionally films like Ridley Scott's Napoleon, George Clooney's The Boys in the Boat and Michael Mann's Ferrari), allows us to slight such matters as actual "quality." And considering just a few of the more obvious aspects of that politics makes it easy to picture things working out this way.

There is, especially in this era of sinking public interest in the Oscars (such that probably the only thing anyone remembers from any recent ceremony is the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air slapping Cheap Pete live before a global audience), a desire to appeal to a more general audience reflected in their paying more attention to widely seen movies.

This year, none has been more widely seen, or likely to be more widely seen, than Barbie, still the #1 hit of the year.

Moreover, unlike other widely watched movies that get nominated for Best Picture even though everyone knows they are not going to win in their category (did anyone seriously expect Top Gun 2 or Avatar 2 to take home the prize last year?), Barbie seems to have been a genuine, not-graded-on-a-curve-as-just-pretty-good-by-blockbuster standards, unqualified critical darling, helmed by a critics' darling of a director with a very loud cheering section of her own who has already been nominated for a Best Director and two Best Screenplay Oscars and not got any of them. This will add to the film's advantages as a box office success enjoying the benefit of critical opinion and the backing of a formidable lobby insistent that it is her "turn" after the disappointments of 2018 and 2020 (and in light of the foregoing, what better time than this for it?).

And of course, there is the more conventionally political aspect of the film. Much as we hear about Hollywood's supposed liberalism, the fact remains that its liberalism has generally been confined to culture war/status politics issues, and much less in evidence on anything else, with the Academy no exception. Thus Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, with its themes of the politics of Big Science, war, the nuclear age and McCarthyism a movie that a genuinely left observer could find compelling if treated the right way (indeed, David Walsh, who seems to have never had a good word for Nolan for two decades, gave this film a strongly positive review), is the kind of thing that these days would make the Academy squeamish indeed. By contrast a movie about the gender politics of plastic toys is more their speed.

That said, not everyone will be happy with the choice. Some will be very unhappy indeed--and very vocal about their unhappiness, in those ways that led to the kind of intriguing of which Andrea Riseborough's Oscar nomination became a target last year, against which a giant major studio production like Barbie will be absolutely proof, but to which other films might be vulnerable. Still, for the time being Barbie is the movie that, whether or not one thinks it most deserving, seems to me most likely to take Best Picture next year, with very little chance of that changing in the months between now and the ceremony.

Can Napoleon Be Another Oppenheimer?

As a biographical film about a historical personage Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer seemed an unpromising commercial prospect to me even before I learned how unconventionally structured it was (that at least at a glance it was a "weirdo art film"). As a result I did not think it likely to match the relatively high projections for its gross some had suggested ($164-$194 million in Boxoffice Pro's final long-range forecast a week before release), and even after the strong opening weekend beat prior expectations for that ($82 million vs. the $52-$72 million projected) wondered if the film would not collapse in its second weekend as audience reactions came to matter more than the cacophonous claquing. However, the movie actually displayed extraordinarily legs at the box office, quadrupling its already high weekend gross to beat the high end of Boxoffice Pro's prediction by 67 percent (taking in $324 million at last count), while taking in nearly twice as much internationally, making of the movie a near-billion dollar hit.

The result is that when looking at Ridley Scott's Napoleon my first reaction was to dismiss it the way I dismissed Oppenheimer--as the kind of biographical-historical period piece for which American audiences in particular have had little appetite for a long time, but then am given pause by how Oppenheimer actually did.

As I said before, I cannot altogether account for Oppenheimer's success with general audiences, who not only came out in those extraordinary numbers on the opening weekend, but kept on coming in the weeks afterward in that way suggestive of a really positive reaction. Still, I can think of at least two advantages that Oppenheimer had that Napoleon does not.

1. Napoleon director Ridley Scott is an established, respected, director with many a hit behind him--notably including one of the biggest commercial successes for the historical drama genre since its collapse in the '60s, Gladiator. Still, he does not have the kind of vocal and effective cheering section that Nolan does--which probably helped to bring audiences out for the unlikely Oppenheimer, and whose lack will not be helpful to the risky Napoleon.

2. Whatever one makes of their handling, Oppenheimer's themes were quite plausibly presented as having contemporary relevance. I do not think that relevance was as fully acknowledged by the media as it ought to have been (it still seems to be pretending nuclear war is irrelevant to our situation in 2023, for example, and does not seem to have given much thought to the portions of the film dealing with McCarthyism), but it seemed common to draw analogies between the development of the nuclear bomb and artificial intelligence in a moment in which the mass media, stupid, irresponsible and reactionary as ever, were working very, very hard to drive the public into hysterics over artificial intelligence research. Accordingly, important as the subject matter of Napoleon's life was, and relevant as it could be made to seem to audiences today (revolution, the descent of democracy into dictatorship, a world war, etc.), I do not see any sign of the press or anyone else doing anything likely to similarly work on the film's behalf.

The result is that it is easy to see Napoleon confirming rather than defying the view that the American public is not up for period pieces like this one--with the tracking information Boxoffice Pro has made available doing little to contradict that reading at the moment. The publication's first long-range forecast for the film anticipates a $16-$21 million opening weekend and a $46-$74 million longer run--which especially in the absence of the film absolutely exploding in the international markets, leaves it a very long way from recouping the doubtless considerable outlay for a lavish production such as one would expect of a Ridley Scott period film, or simply from looking at the commercials. Still, I will be watching how things go for the movie in the coming weeks.

The Opening Weekend Gross of Five Nights at Freddy's: A Few Thoughts

Just as was the case with the upcoming Hunger Games prequel Five Nights at Freddy's was not on my radar until very recently, and I had even less idea as to what to make of it than I did Hunger Games--this being an original film rather than part of a franchise, and the box office dynamics of horror films less familiar to me than those of big action movies, while even by horror film standards Freddy's was atypical. (In contrast with the blood-soaked horror films that usually make a splash, this one kept it PG-13 in what was seen as a risky move.)

Still, the trajectory of the commercial expectations surrounding the film has been more than usually interesting. Just four weeks before Freddy's opened Boxoffice Pro projected an opening weekend of $33-$42 million and the film's finishing in the $60-$90 million range. All things considered this was respectable, but then each of their three subsequent forecasts had the movie edging upward--by 25 percent the immediately following week, 13 percent the week after that, and an amazing 43 percent more after that, on the way up to their right before the opening weekend giving the likely range as $65-$85 million--the kind of numbers conventionally associated not with even successful horror films, but blockbusters.

In the event the movie had a $78 million opening--closer to the high end of the range than the low, a figure which put its debut well ahead of the latest Fast and Furious, Transformers, DCEU, Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible films this past summer (all of which opened in the $54-$67 million range). That debut, moreover, would seem consistent with even a front-loaded run having the film cross the $150 million mark domestically, while it is supplementing its domestic gross with significant international revenues (equaling about two-thirds the North American take), suggesting a global gross well north of $200 million for the $20 million movie.

An undeniable commercial success, it seems worth remarking Freddy's as affirming two developments seen this year. One is the way that while the familiar franchises flop movies that look less promising by the usual standard are not just finding audiences but overperforming significantly--so that one can identify Freddy's with the same pattern of success as Barbie, Oppenheimer, Taylor Swift's concert film The Era's Tour (the #2 movie at the box office this weekend, after two weeks at #1), and The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

The other is that, just like The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Freddy's, if no Mario for name recognition, is based on a popular video game series--and so (likewise, in spite of critical sneers) delivered another big box office success for that long-mocked category of film, the video game-to-feature film adaptation.

In a pop cultural moment in which people are reading LitRPG novels, and producers look for less exploited types of material to back, these two films could be just the beginning of a whole wave of hit films of the kind.

James Bond at the Beginning--and Possible End--of the Age of the Action Movie

Few these days seem to remember why the James Bond movies became a fixture of the pop cultural landscape. This was not because they invented the cinematic spy. (What they did in that regard was already so overfamiliar that some watching the first Bond movies thought they were parodies.) Rather it was the Bond films' invention of the high-concept action-adventure franchise film--the series pioneering the way such films are put together, and marketed.

Of course, others learned to do those things in time (very slowly, as George Lucas' difficulties selling the studio bosses on Star Wars show), and the form has since become ubiquitous. The result is that the Bond films that had been a model of how to "put together an action movie, put together a franchise" became a model of how to "keep pointless sequels coming after the franchise has stopped being relevant," with others paying more attention as the imitators aged (as one is reminded looking at what Lucasfilm's Kathleen Kennedy has had to say about the franchise she runs).

Still, it seems to me that that game might be approaching its end in these days when we can hear above the din of the ever-present claquing the cry "Superhero fatigue!" that is itself part of the broader "Action movie fatigue!" and "Franchise fatigue!" all too evident over the summer of 2023, in which "Spy-fi fatigue!" has been a significant element. (Just look at how, besides the declining salience of James Bond for the young, the Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible franchises both had flops this past half-year.)

It is thus a rather inauspicious time to think about "making more Bond movies"--one reason why the producers are apparently taking their time, though I think another way of thinking about the issue would be to say Bond 26 is stuck in development hell, and people will realize it as the years continue to go by without any new film. Already we have hints that the next Bond film might not arrive until 2027 or 2028--and I think there is a good chance that in 2028 people will still wonder if there is ever going to be a new movie. After all, the idea is not just to create something new, but something that will be appealing to the public, and that in a way that will once more enable a routine output of colossal hits--in a moment in which the era of the kind of film the Bond movies pioneered has passed.

Fundamental reinvention that would give the series sustained, blockbuster-level success a second time is probably too much to ask of any franchise in even the best of times--and these show every evidence of being far from that.

Can Joker 2 be a Hit?

Todd Phillips' Joker was the kind of unconventional movie that somehow gets made every now and then--and once in a while proves a surprise blockbuster, 2019's equivalent of Oppenheimer or Barbie. Still, there has been a good deal of argument over why the relatively small, dark, unconventional film became a billion-dollar hit--whether it was a matter of its genuine cinematic merits, or rather the way that the coprophages and claqueurs of the entertainment press generated around it the biggest moral panic over a major feature film in many years in which they disgraced themselves with their advertisement of their own stupidity, and disgraced themselves yet again with their not always thinly veiled calls for censorship.

This in itself raises questions about how the sequel (Joker: Folie à Deux) coming a whole five years after that arguably unrepeatable moment could be expected to do--with this all the more the case in as there is a shift of genre, from gritty urban drama with a socially critical edge, to offbeat musical love story. What gave the film, for all its imperfections, a real charge in its best moments, could easily fall by the wayside here--all as the shift has me in mind of how Martin Scorsese, of whose work Joker was derivative to a fault, followed up his huge success with Taxi Driver with his big-budget musical flop, New York, New York.* But then again this franchise might just pull off the rare feat of surprising us all a second time.

* Peter Biskind recounts the tale in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

How Will the Film Business Do in 2024?

Last year the recovery of the box office over the course of 2022 in spite of the comparative fewness of the really big releases (the colossal success of the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels, the $400 million+ grosses of Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2, etc.) convinced me that all the year was lacking was the usual slate of such releases. As 2023 was thoroughly packed with likely-looking blockbusters I predicted that the year would see box office grosses return to the pre-pandemic norm.

Of course, this has not been the case. Yes, people went to the theaters--but where the big franchise films had led the recovery through late 2021 and 2022, in 2023 the franchise films just kept flopping, to the point of reversing the trend toward recovery. Indeed, between the beginning of May and the middle of July the box office in 2023, adjusted for inflation, was running behind the box office in 2022, when there were far fewer films out--with only Barbie and Oppenheimer's overperforming spectacularly in late summer enabling any recovery to continue, and even then only slightly, 2023 still looking nearly certain to fall significantly short of the pre-pandemic years box office gross-wise (with just $7.4 billion collected as of this writing, as against the over $9 billion had collected by this point in 2019, or the $11 billion it equals in today's dollars, working out to its being a third down, and little reason evident so far to expect this to change).

In short, the recovery has stalled, while a more fine-grained picture is suggestive of an even more dire situation than that in the degree to which the box office is being carried by a few hits; and those few, ever-more critical hits become harder to predict as very expensive films that seemed like winners (the more expensive for pandemic-related delays and higher interest rates on the money borrowed to make them) keep failing.

The result is that I find myself less optimistic about what 2024 has in store--precisely because it offers pretty much the same kind of release slate that had seemed promising in 2023, packed with the once likely-looking blockbusters that, because they are big, action-oriented franchise films cashing in on very run-down old brand names and run-down old themes, no longer seem so likely as they did just a few years ago. Scheduled for this year are three more Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (Deadpool 3, Captain America 4, The Thunderbolts), and a good deal more Marvel besides (Kraven the Hunter, a third Venom movie, a Spider-Man spin-off in Madame Web), as well as more Ghostbusters, Mad Max and Alien, more Planet of the Apes, more Godzilla and Kong, more Bad Boys, more Transformers, more Karate Kid--and even, decades after the originals, sequels to Beetlejuice and Twister and Gladiator. We have, too, a live-action prequel to the live-action adaptation of The Lion King, as well as more Inside Out and Despicable Me and Kung Fu Panda. We have a John Wick spin-off, a Mean Girls remake, an A Quiet Place prequel. We have . . .

I think this suffices to make the point. If this year is anything like the last, these movies will, on the whole, perform much less well than their backers hoped, with one big film after another flopping outright as audiences decline to pay for movies they never asked for. (Again, Gladiator 2? Seriously?) Meanwhile the compounding of the disruptions of the pandemic by the disruption of the writers' and actors' strikes (the last, still ongoing) will mean the gap between revenue and outlay is that much higher, all as the "China market" can less and less be looked to for salvation in the event of failure at home. For all that there may be a Barbie or an Oppenheimer in there that will provide relief to the studios' finances, but, even allowing that such successes are by their nature difficult to foresee, nothing here looks to me likely. (The best I can come up with is Joker 2, though even that one looks like it can misfire horribly--becoming New York, New York to the first Joker's Taxi Driver.)

The result is that 2024 is shaping up to be another bad year for an already horribly battered Hollywood. To some extent it was not wholly avoidable. Even were Hollywood's executives to have fully rethought this year how they invest their studios' money the release slate would not have changed--it typically being two years or more between the "green-lighting" of a movie and its hitting theaters, with things tending to run more slowly in the wake of the pandemic and its associated confusions, so that 2024 necessarily reflects the premises and choices of 2022, 2021 and even earlier. Still, if the remarks of Robert Iger and David Zaslav are anything to go by, I would not be overly bullish on the prospect of Hollywood changing its practice anytime soon.

Considering the Pew Research Center Report on Americans' Interest in Sports: The Economic Divide

The Pew Research Center put out a report last week that discussed its finding that "Most Americans Don't Closely Follow Professional or College Sports."

I was not very surprised by the "big finding" highlighted by the item's title, or the observations that sports fans tend to be more often male than female, and older than younger. I was more surprised by the finding regarding sports and affluence--that people with higher incomes are more likely to follow sports than people with lower incomes--though perhaps I should not have been. After all, age and maleness both correlate with higher incomes.

Still, I think there is more to it than that.

Consider who is more likely to be into sports. Is it likely to be those who just watch them on TV, or those who attend events in person--which means paying the price of a ticket? Those who just watch sports, or those who play a sport--as with the golfer or tennis player? And who is more likely to be into college sports specifically? Those who have never bveen to college, or those who are alumni of colleges, especially big-name colleges with major athletic programs who have found it worthwhile to retain links to their alma maters? It seems to me that the person who goes to events in person, who plays sports, who has the college connection, is more likely to be a sports fan--and the disposable income and time required to go to games or play sports in adulthood, the kind of background and income that tends to go with having attended a well-known college, correlates with more rather than less affluence.

Thus does it go with the sociality to which all this points. People go to sporting events together, with the experience about enjoying something with others as much as the intrinsic entertainment value of watching the sport itself. People are probably more likely to follow sports if other people they know and interact with (or want to) also follow sports--whether for personal reasons, or business, which is one reason why they stick close to their alma maters (and vice-versa).

All this makes it worth remembering that much as pop culture flogs the image of the rich isolated by their wealth, leaving them worse off than less affluent people who "at least have each other," the reality is that social isolation is probably more a problem of the poor than the rich, making this factor more rather than less significant. Indeed, it may even be that people being habituated to solitary entertainment, especially the kind where people are supposed to be absorbed in the entertainment (like video games, like film and TV intended to be "intense" experiences as is today more the case in the past) may leave them less able to enjoy the kind of entertainment one takes in the attitude of "someone who smokes and watches" as Bertolt Brecht once put it--such as sporting events happen to be--and which seems more likely to be characteristic of the kid who played video games than the kid whose father took them to such events growing up, in which that issue of affluence factors yet again (given whose parents had the chance to take them to games growing up, and send them to that college with the famous team).

The result is that here, as in so much else of life, class matters--and the conventional wisdom (per usual these days) gets the reality all wrong.

Mission: Impossible 8's Delay and What it Means for the Franchise

It was reported this week that Mission: Impossible 8 has been bumped a whole year, from the summer of 2024 to the summer of 2025 due to the interruption of production by the recent strikes.

This is, of course, bad news for the franchise. The interruption and delay, after all, will doubtless raise the doubtless already colossal expenditure on the movie higher still, while making still more unwise the gamble on the movie--not just shooting it before 7 was even out, but making of the two movies a "two-part event." Hollywood has not been unknown to win, and even win big, with such strokes--as with Avengers 3 and 4. However, that was a matter of an unprecedentedly popular franchise at the absolute peak of its success playing this game. The same cannot be said of Mission: Impossible, which is far past its turn-of-the-century peak, with the last film a massive underperformer (instead of the near-billion-dollar hit many expected it failed to break $600 million), and indeed a series low in real terms (worse than 2006's Mission: Impossible III, when the coprophages of the entertainment media went from unhingedly idolizing Tom Cruise to the extreme opposite because he jumped on a couch). The result is that the audience's more usual, annoyed, reaction to getting "one film for the price of two" was already more likely to come into play--such as was seen with the last two Hunger Games films, and the last film taking in $100 million less than its predecessor. In the case of Mission: Impossible 8 this is likely to be exacerbated by an extra year's delay, which especially in these times seems more likely to make audiences lose interest, or even forget, than make them hunger for more.

Mission: Impossible 8 merely matching what Mission: Impossible 7 grossed at the box office would probably have been disappointing enough given its prior budgeting. With its likely increased cost, and the likelihood of the movie making even less than Mission: Impossible 7 did, the gap between outlay and revenue would be worse--a perhaps $300 million+ film grossing less than $500 million at the global box office, translating to another hole in the books that its studio does not need, all as worse still is not out of the question with so many franchises seeing not just erosion, but Flash-like collapse as Hollywood's royalty, endlessly flattered by their courtiers and claqueurs in the entertainment press and elsewhere, keep feeding the public sequels for which it never asked--and for which it refuses to pay.

Considering the Pew Research Center Report on Americans' Interest in Sports: The Generational Divide

Not long ago I had occasion to think about how athletes seemed to have a higher profile in the media world just a couple of decades back, so that even people who did not follow their sport often knew something about them.

There seemed no great mystery there. Pop culture was a smaller territory then than now, and perhaps especially important the offerings of television more limited, so that sports had less competition for eyeballs, and was that much bigger a part of the culture generally, so that even the inattentive noticed.

There was also a significant amount of "sports entertainment" that got attention from people who did not ordinarily care to follow sports, because of its gimmicks or other attractions--like the old American Gladiators show, or the WWE (especially in the turn-of-the-century "Attitude Era"), providing plenty of visibility to a good many athletes, while there were still such things as fitness celebrity-packed workout shows on ESPN in the morning. And there was the way in which all this was leveraged, with the WWE, for example, pursuing tie-ins and cross-overs, getting their stars guest spots wherever they could, so that watching Star Trek: Voyager on UPN you saw Seven of Nine fighting The Rock for some reason--and very unusually for that character, losing, because there is no way they are going to put The Rock out there just to get beat up.

Sometimes this led to a second career, with The Rock, and John Cena, certainly, becoming as close to film stars as anyone gets to be in the twenty-first century. But all of that would seem to have fallen by the wayside (Gina Carano perhaps the last such success story, though alas her career is in a period of downturn). Effect as well as cause of those changes in media, it all probably plays its part in the generation gap existing between older enthusiasts and the less interested young the Pew Research Center would seem to have reconfirmed this month.

Boxoffice Pro Revises its Numbers for Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels) Downward (Again)

Whatever one makes of The Flash as a film it was in commercial terms the worst flop of the summer--a $300 million movie that finished its worldwide theatrical run with a mere $271 million grossed. Constituting outright collapse for the DCEU franchise of which it is a part, the flopping of franchise film after franchise film over the summer (Fast and Furious, Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible) had me wondering if Captain Marvel 2 (The Marvels) might not similarly be a moment of Flash-like collapse for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Two weeks ago Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast including the film confirmed the impression, with an estimate of $121-$189 million for the film's domestic run, the low end of the range only marginally better than what The Flash picked up in North America ($108 million).

Still, bad as that was I remembered all too well how many of the year's underperformers saw their prospects decay between that first long-range forecast and their opening weekend--and while last week's forecast edged downward only marginally (2 percent they said) this week's forecast showed a significant dip. The publication's projection for the film's run is now $109 million-$169 million, a significant drop from the already low figure of two weeks before that leaves the low end of the range almost exactly at what The Flash managed, and we still have two weeks to go, during which a lot could change--possibly for the better, but perhaps also for the worse. At that same point, two weeks from release, Boxoffice Pro was projecting a $208-$322 million gross for The Flash, meaning that they expected the movie would make at worst twice and perhaps three times what it actually ended up making.

Were The Marvels to underperform similarly relative to its own two-weeks-before-release projection the movie would make $55-60 million, not on opening weekend, but over its entire run, ending up with half what The Flash grossed domestically--without necessarily doing better abroad. In that case my earlier projection of $250-$500 million, which had already been revised downward from an earlier figure that was not all that great, would seem overoptimistic.

This is a really extreme scenario, of course. But the point is that this is how badly that movie crashed and burned this year, such that it cannot be wholly ruled out.

Still, at the other end of the spectrum of possibility there is the possibility of people who see the film actually liking it. After all, hits these days seem to be less front-loaded than they used to be--in part because the usual claquing may be less effective (it sure fell flat with The Flash), but perhaps also because people are less intent on heading out on opening weekend, with other people actually finding a film worthwhile getting them out there on those later weekends as we have seen time and again this year.

Consider what that might mean for the current anticipation of a $45-$67 million opening weekend (especially as just as things could get much worse, there is no guarantee that they will). Should the film manage to, in spite of this weak debut, end up displaying the kind of staying power that Elemental did--more than quintupling its gross--the film would make $235-$350 million domestically. If the international markets respond similarly (within a situation where the final take adheres to the 38/62 domestic/international split seen with the original Captain Marvel) this would work out to a gross in the vicinity of $930 million at the high end of the range, a near-billion dollar hit exceeding anything the MCU has achieved since Dr. Strange 2 (and every really comparable movie since Avatar 2), while even at the low end of the range the movie would make $600 million+, at least bringing the movie within striking distance of breaking even.

For my part I can picture the performance shifting downward more easily than I can picture it moving upward--but I also think that some caution is increasingly in order about assuming too much on the basis of an opening weekend. Between the two I will, for now, stick with my prior projection of $250-$500 million for the worldwide gross, if with the low end looking that much more likely after this latest report.

Are Box Office Hits Becoming Less Front-Loaded? (The Evidence of 2022 and 2023)

Last year the success of Top Gun 2 was received as significant confirmation of the recovery of the box office--but also something more.

Some rushed to argue that the movie's success suggested the old-fashioned star-powered vehicle was back.

If so, there has been little evidence for this position this year--with even Tom Cruise's own draw as a star far from affirmed by the way Mission: Impossible 7 flopped.

Such observers would have done better to pay attention to how Top Gun 2 became such a big money-maker. Yes, a big crowd came out opening weekend--but what is more important it drew surprisingly big crowds on the second weekend, and the third, and the fourth, week after week after week, so that even in its ninth weekend in play (by which time many films have virtually vanished from the theaters) the movie still brought in over $10 million. It did not slip from the "top five" of the weekend until week 11, and even after that point managed to bring in another $55 million on top of its already considerable pile. The result was that Top Gun 2 more than quintupled its very respectable first three day gross of $127 million (with a total of $719 million collected domestically).

Few films have done so well. However, it is notable that Avatar: The Way of Water likewise quintupled its opening weekend gross. Meanwhile this year Barbie, Oppenheimer and The Super Mario Bros. Movie each quadrupled their hefty opening weekend gross, while if not a hit on the same scale Elemental more than quintupled its own opening gross.

This is quite a contrast with how movies like Avengers: Endgame, even as their grosses soared to new heights, tended to make forty percent of their money in their first three days of release--and it may well be that we are starting to see a pattern emerge here, the more in as so much else is changing.

Consider the films that have done well in 2023. The kind of movies that were conventionally front-loaded--big franchise sequels--have tended to do less well, as more idiosyncratic movies became successes. Their doing less well would by itself seem to suffice to make movies less front-loaded generally. Yet one can picture other factors at work here, the more in as they can seem related to that weaker response to new releases in big franchises--like audiences being less susceptible to "I've got to see it opening weekend!"-type hype; their, perhaps, being more likely to come out if they heard good things from actual people rather than just the claqueurs, so that perhaps the first weekend is not so strong, but the dip from the first to the second weekend is not so severe as might have been expected, because that word of mouth brought in people who would not otherwise have showed at all--with franchise films providing further confirmation of this by seeming to follow the same trajectory when they do well. There was no second-weekend succor for, for example, The Flash--but Guardians of the Galaxy 3 may be such a case. The movie's opening was generally regarded as disappointing, perhaps even to suggest a film underperforming to the same degree as Ant-Man 3--but industry-watchers were heartened by the second weekend response. This did not make the film as leggy as Elemental, but the sequel proved leggier than its initially better-received predecessor (where Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did not quite make 2.7 times its opening weekend gross, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 tripled that gross), enabling it to go a rather longer way to matching its gross than would otherwise have been possible for it.

The result is that box office-watchers might do better to show a little more caution in regard to using opening weekend response as a basis for their guesses about a film's overall run--the more in as the hits carrying the film industry these days are less likely to be the same kinds of draw on which it relied before.

Bond 26: Injecting a Little Reality into the Conversation

As Christopher Marc just remarked over at The Playlist, while "British tabloids would like us to believe that 'Bond 26' is just around the corner" (citing their endless rumor-mongering), Barbara Broccoli, speaking to the Guardian to promote Amazon Prime Video's reality show "007: Road to a Million," acknowledged that "When we get going on a Bond movie it takes our full attention for three or four years so that’s our focus."

In the wake of the remark--as an actual public statement from someone in the know, much more meaningful than what the entertainment press has generally exploited for the purpose of keeping up chatter about the franchise--some have considered the implication that it will be that length of time from now before a Bond film is ready for audiences. In other words, rather than 2025, one might do better to think 2027--or even 2028--or perhaps later than that.

Having spent a long time looking at the difficulties involved in keeping the Bond franchise going--and the upheaval in the film market today--even 2027 seems so far away as to represent possibly a different cinematic scene altogether from the one we know.

What Does Captain Marvel 2's Short Running Time Suggest About the Film?

It is at this point a common observation that movies have been getting longer and longer over the years. Discussing the trend I have tended to think of it as a matter of the studios having a harder time getting people to the theater and responding by trying to make their movie seem like an event somehow, and cramming in more spectacle, both of which conduce to those longer movies. Still, however one explains it the fact of those longer running times remains, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) no exception to the trend. Where the MCU's Phase One films averaged 124 minutes, the Phase Four films averaged 139 minutes--a fifteen minute expansion over the course of the decade between them (when, by the standard of 1985, even the Phase One movies were long for action films).

The reports indicating that Captain Marvel 2 will run a mere 105 minutes--versus the 139 minute norm for Phase Four of the MCU, the 133 minute norm for the saga overall, and even the 123 minute length of the first Captain Marvel, can thus seem a bit of a surprise. My guess is that this partly reflects the movie's tighter focus (the really long movies, like the Avengers films or The Eternals, tended to deal with bigger groups of superheroes), and lighter, more humorous tone, which brevity better befits (Ant-Man movies tending to be briefer than, for instance, Black Panther movies).

Still, that a movie that is a very big-budgeted superhero sequel is so much shorter than its predecessor may suggest something else going on, especially in light of the word about reshoots and delays--that dissatisfaction with what was filmed led to some brutal cuts, and a much shorter film than was originally intended. For an extreme case of the kind of thing I have in mind, consider that other superhero film, 2010's Jonah Hex, which clocked in at a mere 81 minutes. (Worldwide gross--$11 million, while so far as I know this one did not redeem itself in home entertainment.)

Of course, it will not be much more than two weeks before the audience gets to see the film for itself (while for what it is worth even the most pessimistic assessment still anticipates the movie doing a lot better than Jonah Hex gross-wise).

Just How Long Have the Running Times of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Films Actually Been?

The reports of Captain Marvel 2 as the shortest film the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to date sent me checking the figures on that. Just checking the numbers at Box Office Mojo it appeared that the 32 prior Marvel Cinematic Universe films ranged in running time from 112 minutes (for 2008's The Incredible Hulk and 2013's Thor 2) to 181 minutes (for 2019's Avengers: Endgame). The average seems to have been 133 minutes for the whole sequence from the original 2008 Iron Man to Guardians of the Galaxy 3, though it should be noted that the movies have trended toward longer running times--with the Phase One average 124 minutes, the Phase Two average 126 minutes, the Phase Three average 136 minutes and the Phase Four average 139 minutes, working out to a 15 minute growth from Phase One to Phase Four.

Still, even allowing for the overall trend toward longer movies there are distinct patterns to the differences in length across phases. Those movies about a larger grouping, as with the four Avengers films (ranging from 141 to 181 minutes), Captain America: Civil War (143 minutes) or The Eternals (156 minutes), tend to be rather longer than those centered on a single character, and especially those introducing a new character, which tend to clock in at the low end of the range (115-125 minutes or so). The Phase Four-released Captain Marvel was no exception to the pattern, coming as it did to just 123 minutes.

One also sees a tendency to brevity in the lighter, more comedy-oriented films. Certainly the Ant-Man films tended to run shorter than the average (averaging about two hours versus the 133 minute norm for the saga), with this also going for the notoriously silly Thor 4 (which clocked in at just 118 minutes).

As The Marvels has a tighter focus and lighter tone it seems natural for it to tend toward a shorter running time, to run for a little under two hours rather than a lumbering two-and-a-half. However, it is still something of a surprise to see a Phase Five sequel clock in at 18 minutes shorter than the original Captain Marvel, and about a quarter shorter than the usual Phase Four running time.

Of "Barbenheimer," Spider-Man and Elemental

During the summer of 2023 we have seen those movies that looked like "sure things" (Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible, superheroes) disappoint badly--but we have also seen success where it might have been least expected. The most conspicuous case was, of course, "Barbenheimer"--how Barbie and Oppenheimer both overperformed so massively that they could be credited with saving the summer box office from the ignominy of an even poorer performance than was seen in 2022. However, we should consider, too, those other, less conventional films that did relatively well. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was, for Hollywood, a rare animated hit outside the family comedy or musical comedy genres--doubling the domestic gross of the first film as, also bettering its overseas gross, it approached a worldwide box office take of $700 million (while in North America outdoing every live-action superhero film so far this year), validating a relatively bold choice of project.

If in a more qualified way, Elemental may also be credited as a chancier film that ended up doing better than expected as safer films failed all around it--though of course how industry-watchers, and the industry, will respond to this remains to be seen.

The Decision to Go With a Theatrical Release for Blue Beetle, in Hindsight

Amid the collapse of the delusions about the profitability of streaming Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) found itself shifting course dramatically with two DC Comics-based superhero films it had originally intended to release to its MAX service, Batgirl and Blue Beetle. On the grounds that it was too costly to make economic sense anymore as a streaming project, and too "small" for theatrical release, the company's bosses decided to simply bury Batgirl, while "upgrading" Blue Beetle to a theatrical release with a bigger production budget and the associated backing. As it happened the movie seems to have got a decent reception from critics--and the few who saw it (such that it has a 92 percent Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). However, the latter were not very numerous, with the movie's worldwide gross now standing below the $130 million mark.

Given what has been heard of the film's budget ($100 million+), what might be expected of the fuller expenditure (at least as much to distribute and promote it, and other claims on the revenue stream), between theatrical rentals and what the movie might make after its theatrical run from home entertainment, etc. (perhaps not doing more than matching that share of the ticket sales of $60 million or so), the backers could be out tens of millions.

As losses go this can seem trivial next to the hundreds of millions in losses the WBD may have suffered with The Flash. Still, it does raise the question of whether the company has done better putting the film out in theaters than simply finishing the movie on a lower budget and putting it out on streaming per the original plan.

Any thoughts on that, readers?

Elemental Goes From Flop to Hit

By the time the tracking-based estimates for Elemental began to circulate last May a note of pessimism about such films was penetrating through the noise of the usual claquing, especially about the productions of that studio that just a few years ago had looked as if it could do no very great wrong, Disney--the more in as Ant-Man 3 had disappointed, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had just opened to underwhelming numbers. The way the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid opened also did not help--and nor did the recent record of Disney animation (Disney having the prior year seen two big-budgeted animated movies, one of them from Pixar, make Deadline's list of the year's top five money-losers).

When Elemental arrived it did not defy the low expectations held for it, opening to just under $30 million. Still, the movie turned out to have Top Gun-like legs, more than quintupling its domestic take, while doing very well overseas, pulling in almost 69 percent of its box office gross from the international markets. The result is that where, more optimistic than most, I think (partly on the grounds that "concept-heavy" movies of this kind often find a warmer reception internationally than domestically), I suggested a likely range of $250-$450 million for the worldwide gross, and hewed toward the middle of that range more than the top, the movie overtopped that upper bound to pull in just a little less than a half billion dollars.

Admittedly this is not a prepossessing number for a Disney animated film by pre-pandemic standards (let alone coming out of the celebrated Pixar)--but we are told that it assures the film's profitability (at least, by the time that post-theatrical revenues like home entertainment, where Disney does well, are added in). The result is that, with the bar admittedly not very high, this one can be counted as a much-needed win for the studio.

How Much Will The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Gross at the Box Office?

Up until now I have not given the Hunger Games prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, much thought. It simply seemed to me that there was just not much demand for the movie (certainly nothing to inspire confidence in grosses on par with those of the preceding four films).

After all, the Hunger Games saga did not seem to cry out for continuation--let alone a prequel. This seemed to me all the more the case because of the way the saga, in print and on screen, ended on a disappointing note for many (the fourth film was the lowest-grossing of the lot by a significant margin, its gross a third or so down at the North American box office from the second film's); because the young adult dystopian action-adventure fad was already waning at that point, and now seems far behind us; because in book form the prequel had robust sales but does not seem to have had the phenomenal sales the original trilogy managed, testifying to the decline of interest; and because of the kind of success the original Hunger Games was, and the way the prequel relates to that.

Reading that original Hunger Games trilogy (I did discuss this in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry) it seemed to me that Suzanne Collins succeeded with readers by interesting them in the personal drama of Katniss Everdeen--rather than with striking ideas, or a particularly compelling world, on which levels the book seemed to be weaker, while also being less successful with readers. (Considering the weaker response to the third book and the final two films it seemed to me significant that by this point the story increasingly emphasized "the bigger picture," the high politics, the harder sci-fi elements, which were both less well–conceived and presented than the personal story of the earlier books, and a tougher pitch to the general audience than a personal drama.) And this prequel is set way before Katniss Everdeen came along--a prequel relying ultimately on the interest of the background that seemed a weak foundation, with all that implies for a blockbuster-sized audience buying tickets to this one.

The result is that while I did not bother making estimates, Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast regarding the film came to me as no surprise--their prediction that the movie will pull in $90-$142 million, not on its opening weekend, but its entire North America run. In other words, even at the high end of the range the movie can be expected to pull in fewer dollars over that whole run than the first Hunger Games managed in its opening weekend more than a decade ago (when in March 2012 it grossed $153 million). Adjusted for inflation the projection for the prequel actually falls short of what the first Hunger Games movie made in its first two days ($118 million, or $158 million in September 2023 dollars). It is also scarcely two-fifths of the real terms gross of the lowest-earning of the movies (the fourth, Mockingjay--Part Two, whose $281 million in 2015 equals $365 million in September 2023 dollars).

Of course, one might wonder if the international market will come to the movie's rescue. As it happens the domestic/international split varies from 59/41 to 43/57 in the case of the four films released between 2012 and 2015. Let us now derive from these proportions multipliers for the North American gross as a way of calculating the worldwide gross--1.7 at the low end, 2.3 at the high end. Multiplying $90 million by 1.7 gets us $153 million. Multiplying $142 million by 2.3 gets us $327 million. Rounding for the nearest $50 million this gives us a range of $150 million-$350 million, versus the $850 million that the fourth film made globally in today's terms (or the $1.14 billion the second film, Catching Fire, made).

There is no way to read this as anything but a collapse in the global as well as the domestic gross, even at the high end, never mind the low--enough so that while I have yet to see a budget declared for the film from a source I feel that I can rely on, in light of the prior films' budgets (circa $80 million for the first, $160 million for the fourth, and thus $100-$200 million+ in today's terms) it seems safe to assume this production was not cheaper. Even at the bottom end of the range (a movie budgeted like the first Hunger Games, at least when the net is considered, with post-production costs merely comparable) for the movie to have much chance of breaking even with the help of its post-theatrical earnings it would need to make much more than $200 million, well above the bottom end of the range.* For a movie budgeted like the fourth film it would probably need even more than the $350 million comprising the high end of the range here. The result is that I can picture this production, which seemed to me ill-conceived from the start, easily being another addition to the year's already long list of big-budget money-losers.

* The premise of this estimate is that a $100 million film would, given the final bill being at least twice the production budget, come to $200 million+; and that films at this level tend to make well over 50 percent of their total gross from theatrical ticket sales; suggesting $120 million+ in rentals, and thus $250 million in ticket sales, as a necessity. With the film plausibly running a multiple of that in regard to expenses (a $200 million+ production, as much or even more for associated expenses like marketing and distribution for a total not implausibly in the vicinity of a half billion), that much more in the way of ticket sales is needed (especially as home entertainment, streaming, etc. revenues tend to have a lower ceiling than ticket sales).

Captain Marvel 2's Chances in Theaters: An Update

Some time ago I suggested that just as the DCEU suffered a collapse at the box office with The Flash, Captain Marvel 2 could be the same kind of disaster for Marvel. Last week's tracking-based estimates from Boxoffice Pro seemed to affirm that, with Flash-like numbers (an opening in the $50-$75 million range, as a movie that might have been expected to take in $700 million pulled in, at the low end of their projection, $121 million--as against The Flash's $108 million).

Of course, there was at the time still a month to go and I wondered if the numbers might not shift significantly. We had seen the estimates for Barbie and Oppenheimer, for example, rise greatly in the month before the release of both those films--while in release both movies considerably overtopped the expectations held for them on the very eve of their openings. However, other films have seen the expectations for their ticket sales plummet in those same weeks--as was the case with, for example, The Flash and Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible 7. And to be frank Captain Marvel 2 looks more like these as a big-budget action-adventure franchise film of the kind that has run into so much trouble lately. The result is that I have had my eye on the week-to-week fluctuations.

As it happens, there was not much movement since last week--a 2 percent drop one could dismiss as a "rounding error." Still, it was not the upward movement, let alone the significant upward movement, those hoping the film will be a hit must want to see--who will have to find consolation in there still being almost three weeks to go, and the fact that after that the speculation ends and the moviegoers themselves will make the only commercial judgment on the film that counts in the end.

The Expendables 4: Where it Stands Now

Ordinarily I go by Box Office Mojo when citing box office grosses, but given the evident incompleteness of their figures in regard to The Expendables 4 (China is left out altogether) it was worthwhile to go elsewhere. Offering an alternative, apparently more complete, figure, is The Numbers, which as of yesterday reported the film's worldwide gross, at last count, as a little under $49 million.

$49 million.

The movie will probably edge past the $50 million mark before it departs theaters entirely, but not by much, which would work out to perhaps $25 million in rentals for the movie's backers--as against the $100 million+ they spent on production, and the at least comparable figure that they probably spent on everything else (promotion, distribution, participations and residuals).

Theatrical flops do sometimes become hits in home entertainment--but there is a very big gap indeed between that $25 million and the $200 million+ laid out for the film, the kind of gap that few movies but blockbusters are able to cover.

The result is that in just about any year but this one the movie would be guaranteed a spot on Deadline's inevitable list of the top money-losers of the year--while even in the year of The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 this one still has a shot at that dubious distinction.

Will Christopher Nolan Be Directing Bond 26?: Reflections on the Chatter

In the two years since the release of No Time to Die the entertainment press has not had much to work with while keeping up the chatter about the next Bond film but rehashing old Bond trivia and speculations and suggestions about what they think the producers might do, or should do, in the next installment they are all absolutely sure is coming.

The result is that when reports of Christopher Nolan being up to helm a rebooted Bond franchise--with the reboot perhaps seeing the original Bond novels refilmed in their own periods--started to circulate they were quick to talk all this up.

Since then things have quieted down--for now, at least. (Even if there is nothing much to it in the absence of any real news people will probably resuscitate the idea.)

Still, the idea is not wholly implausible, given the direction of the films in recent years. Back in Albert Broccoli's time a Nolan would never have been given such a chance--but the franchise has gone from being "creative producer"-run as it was with Broccoli, to looking to critics' darling-type would-be auteurs (Marc Foster, Sam Mendes, Danny Boyle, Cary Fukunaga) to freshen things up. And Nolan in particular seems to have been on their minds for a long time, given how much the rebooted Bond films followed in the footsteps of Nolan's Batman trilogy.

Thus did they begin with an origin story about Bond becoming Bond, recounted in a tone some call "dark and gritty" (and others call "market pessimism"). Thus did they use for the big twist in Skyfall the big twist in The Dark Knight (that the first Avengers film and Star Trek and doubtless others have also ripped off). Thus did they give the reboot they had likewise made "more personal" an ending as well as a beginning, with the series ending with the hero.

It does not seem unreasonable that spending so much time "borrowing" Nolan's ideas they would have thought "Why not just actually get Nolan?" Especially given that it would automatically get a press that loves him, and his sizable online following, very excited about the project.

This would seem all the more the case given how the last few years have gone for Nolan--with Nolan directing a spy thriller of his own in Tenet that was well-received by critics and fans (even if the pandemic crushed its chances of being a blockbuster); while in a summer in which the film studios were failing miserably in getting the public to the theater Nolan somehow made his weirdo postmodern art film about a scientist from the 1940s into a near-billion dollar blockbuster. It would seem the more natural still if the Bond franchise's runners are at all enticed by the idea of following after the continuation novels by sending the screen Bond back to his own era (given that Nolan has helmed commercially successful period pieces not just in Oppenheimer, but Dunkirk).

Still, that a Nolan-helmed Bond film may seem plausible for all these reasons does not actually mean that this is the direction being taken--or even that the result actually stands much chance of working. After all, Nolan succeeded here in giving the public something other than a franchise film and now they want him to . . . make a franchise film just as those franchise films are failing. Perhaps a period franchise film of exactly the kind whose riskiness the colossal failure of Indiana Jones 5 just underlined, to which little really new can be brought at this stage of things, let alone anything really new that a vast audience would care to see. I certainly do not think the general moviegoing audience really wants something faithful to the Fleming originals--while I suspect that any such approach would make much more sense on the small screen than on the large, a very different kind of project from the one we are talking about here.

What Will the Marvel Cinematic Universe Bring in 2024? (And Will Audiences Go For It?)

A prior post here considering Marvel's potential to stage a comeback--concerned in the main with Marvel's prospects given the real problem evident after this year's string of underwhelming box office performances, that the high-concept franchise action film that has been king of the box office for decades is in decline. Still, even admitting this of the general market one might imagine Marvel managing to carry on, and even reverse the downward trend its films have been displaying at the box office.

In thinking about that it seems worth considering the movies scheduled for release in 2024.

There are three for the time being--Deadpool 3 on that critical first weekend of summer, the first of the rebooted Captain America films (Captain America: Brave New World) in late July, and The Thunderbolts in December.

How do their chances look at this very early stage of things?

There is no question that Deadpool has his fans. However, the question is whether, six years after the last Deadpool movie, audiences will be up to a third helping of the same shtick, and whether it will matter much for the overall MCU. While I admit to not having been impressed with it even the first time around, others were, and I think it plausible that at least enough of the fans will come out to make the film a success by deflated, post-pandemic standards--but even such a success has to be qualified. Deadpool actually began as part of Fox's X-Men franchise, rather than the MCU, and is very different in style and tone from the rest of the generally PG-13-rated franchise, so that it may not suffer as much as others from the Marvel brand losing some of its luster--while the same relationship to the franchise means that its success cannot help the MCU much, if it indeed becomes a success.

This matters all the more as the next two Phase Five films are far from the sure bets they might have seemed to be a few years ago. Captain America became a major success for Marvel, with 2016's Captain America: Civil War one of the MCU's earlier $1 billion+ hits, but this arrives after an eight year gap with the last Captain America movie, a five year gap with the last Captain America appearance in Avengers: Endgame, and entails a significant overhaul when the pattern is already the films' performing well below the bar set by their immediate and especially Phase Three predecessors. (I also wonder what to make of the decision to bring back Tim Blake Nelson's Samuel Sterns--recycling an element from the little-seen 2008 The Incredible Hulk. Is this, like the tie-ins with the streaming shows, a sign of a franchise wrapped up in itself expecting the general audience to show the attentiveness of the hardcore, and in the process alienating them?) The late July release date (a change of plans that came in the wake of the big Hollywood strikes of this year) may also be unhelpful. Meanwhile The Thunderbolts, in presenting another superhero team that is far from the Avengers or the X-Men in regard to name recognition, puts me in mind of the less than wholly successful The Eternals.

The result is that if the MCU manages a "comeback," I do not see it happening on the basis of its 2024 releases on the basis of the available evidence. Instead it is easier to picture the present discontents with the MCU continuing--or even these films ending up further additions to Marvel's "loss" column.

Will Captain Marvel 2 Lose Money? (Revisiting the Numbers)

Previously, in light of the revelations about the cost of making Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels) I speculated that the movie might need to make $650 million+ at the box office in order for its backers to break even on their investment.

At the time I was still working with my initial projection of a worldwide gross of $600-$700 million.

Recently extrapolating from Boxoffice Pro's tracking data-based estimate of the domestic gross ($121-$189 million) I suggested that, in a new low for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (removing the exceptional conditions of 2020-2021 from the picture) the movie might make $250-$500 million worldwide.

The result is that the mark at which profitability becomes plausible is that much further removed from even the high end of its likely gross. If that proves the case the movie might, instead of turning a modest profit, or even just covering its cost, be another loss-maker for Disney--in the worst-case scenario (a Flash-like performance) another $100 million+ loss for Disney, and even an Indiana Jones 5-caliber loser.

Of course, it is best to reiterate that this is an estimate made with still a month to go. I see no grounds to expect the situation to get better than it is--but all the same, a good deal can change in a few weeks, and for my part I will be keeping an eye on this one.

Can the Marvel Cinematic Universe Make a Comeback?

Back in the 2010s the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) went from strength to strength at the box office, especially in its 2012-2019 second and third phases, with Avengers: Endgame capping a historic commercial success.

However, as with so much else in the world the period since the pandemic has been unkind to it--the movie industry generally taking a brutal beating, one whose effects have persisted even as audiences for the most part resumed their theatergoing, with the MCU suffering along with the rest. Much of the MCU's trouble has been a matter of a more closed Chinese market (this was the biggest factor in the trouble Ant-Man 3 had), but it has had its share of woes even in its home North American market, where Thor 4, Black Panther 2, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 all performed below what might have been hoped for given their predecessors' earnings--while the current expectations regarding Captain Marvel 2 look a lot like what happened with The Flash, implying that worse, much worse, may be in store not just for that movie but the several others behind it in the pipeline, and the Marvel brand as a whole.

Of course, franchises do make comebacks. In its long history the James Bond franchise did so more than once--the franchise most notably recovering from its '80s-era decline with Goldeneye and the subsequent films of the Pierce Brosnan era. Still, the Brosnan period was only a period of relative success, falling well short of the franchise's '60s-era heyday, and could not have given the very different market. (Back in the '60s Bond had no competitors in the high-concept action-adventure franchise market. By contrast the field was pretty crowded by the '90s.) The result is that any recovery for the MCU is likely to be only relative, the kind of success the franchise saw in 2018-2019 (with Black Panther and Captain Marvel, and the two-part Avengers event, and Spider-Man and Ant-Man too, selling $9 billion in tickets in a mere year and a half) is simply not a reasonable expectation for any franchise's "business as usual" for very long.*

Moreover, even relative recovery can seem a longshot given, regardless of what Marvel does with its movies, the kind of movie Marvel makes and can be expected to go on making in any conceivable scenario--the high-concept action-adventure blockbuster franchise movie, which, as the troubles of the James Bond series that invented the form, and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series' that went such a long way to making them a Hollywood staple, and the DCEU that has been Marvel's closest thing to a rival, and this summer's Fast and Furious and Transformers and Mission: Impossible movies all show, is looking very shopworn these days in the 2020s. Indeed, investing in superhero movies these days is starting to look like investing in big, splashy historical epics and musicals in the late 1960s--sticking to an ever-more costly and increasingly losing old game when the studios would be doing better to look to new ideas to be the basis of new successes.

* Of course, these have been inflationary years, and $9 billion in 2018-2019 works out to more like $11 billion today.

The "Who Will Be the Next James Bond?" Chatter: A Note

As the claqueurs of the entertainment press endeavor to keep people talking about James Bond, and especially the unannounced next Bond film, on the basis of nearly nothing in the way of actual information, they have devoted much attention to speculation about and suggestions regarding the recasting of the lead, in the main going over the same list over and over and over again. (Yes, they are still talking about Henry Cavill. And Idris Elba. And all the other names you have heard three billion times already, as well as lots of names you have probably never even heard of at all. Like this Aaron Taylor-Johnson person they aren't shutting up about now.)

This seems to me to put the cart before the horse--given that the vision for the character, which is in turn a matter of the broader vision of the series, is what would make a particular actor more or less suitable to the role, especially with this not merely a matter of recasting but rebooting something that has already been repeatedly rebooted, and some serious change apparently in order after the uneven performance of the last film. (The point cannot be emphasized enough--No Time to Die was the series' weakest performer in North America since Licence to Kill, and probably not just here but elsewhere James Bond, like Indiana Jones, has failed to renew his fan base, with all that this promises for interest in a series that has only had one new film out since 2015.)

Do the series-runners have a new vision? One that actually stands a chance of appealing to a broad public? The silence on everything important to that possibility (the more obvious amid the noise about nothing at all, or what may yet turn out to be nothing at all) makes it difficult indeed to tell--but I am personally struck by the tallness of the order. The Bond movies, after all, succeeded by inventing the high-concept action-adventure franchise film--and kept the series going by adapting to that genre's evolution, putting up the ever-bigger budgets required for the first-stringers and shamelessly imitating every other success out there (from Jaws and Star Wars in the '70s to Jason Bourne and Christopher Nolan's Batman saga in the '00s). But now the whole game looks like it is drawing to an end--implying that a viable reboot will have to deliver a more fundamental overhaul of the series. And given the extreme reluctance of Hollywood to break with its longtime standard operating procedure, it seems to me that no one is offering any model for what the series might do on this score--forcing that much heavier a burden of imitation on those who would hope to bring Bond back to the screen successfully. If they do so it will be a striking feat--in marketing terms, if not artistically. But I cannot picture any possibility that would work (emphasis on the latter, as the claqueurs have not been short on ideas--the problem instead that all the ones I have heard from them have been completely unconvincing).

What do you think, readers? Anyone seeing the Bond series pull off the needed feat of reinvention to keep the franchise chugging along through another decade or more?

Captain Marvel 2 vs. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Captain Marvel 2's Likely Box Office

In the wake of Boxoffice Pro's announcement of its tracking data-based projections for the domestic opening weekend and overall run of Captain Marvel 2 the figures have been making the rounds of the "armchair movie executive"-oriented entertainment news outlets. Given that the figures suggest the movie's performing much less like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Phase Three-released original Captain Marvel than they do The Flash (with an opening weekend in the $50-$75 million range and an overall run in the $120-$190 million range, vs. the half-billion dollar hit that first film was in today's terms), there has not been much room for even the most grade-on-a-curve-minded of the claqueurs of the entertainment press to pretend this is anything like good news for the movie. (Indeed, "abysmal" reads the headline at one such site.)

Since I had weeks ago suggested that the movie might be the MCU's equivalent of the DCEU's The Flash this was not exactly a shock to me--but I admit that there was some room for people to think otherwise, and not simply because they were cleaving to old predictions like Screen Rant's guess back in January.* One reason is Guardians of the Galaxy 3's performance this past summer, which it seems worthwhile to revisit.

In raising the matter of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 one should start by acknowledging that the movie did not buck the trend of MCU films making less (in inflation-adjusted, real terms) than their immediate series predecessors--the movie making a good deal less than Guardians of the Galaxy 2, as against the quarter-to-half drop seen with the other movies. However, in comparison with the latest Thor, Black Panther, Ant-Man films, it held up rather better--the drop about 20 percent relative to Guardians of the Galaxy 2. This could have been taken as meaning Captain Marvel 2 might not do too badly relative to its own high-performing predecessor. However, there were at least four significant differences undermining any such analogy (which was why, even months ago, I did not see Captain Marvel 2 breaking $700 million, let alone a billion):

1. Considering the case of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it is worth remembering that the film was initially seen as a disappointment--its opening weekend gross softer than anticipated (a rough one-third drop from what its predecessor managed domestically). However, the film turned out to have surprisingly good "legs"--better than its predecessor (so that where the second Guardians movie made 2.65 times its opening weekend gross, Guardians 3 more than tripled the take from its first three days), implying a particularly strong audience response. That suggested that a film audiences liked might do a bit better than some of those that had gone before it, but it could not be taken for granted that this would happen with other Marvel movies (while, again, the film still ended up with 20 percent less grossed than its predecessor).

2. Just as Guardians of the Galaxy 3 proved an exception in its good legs, making it a questionable point of comparison for Captain Marvel 2, the first Captain Marvel was also an outlier--as it was released in the most fortuitous possible circumstances for such a movie. Not only did it come out during the MCU's Phase Three, but it came out mere weeks before the absolute peak of the franchise with the release of Avengers: Endgame, maximizing interest; while the claims made for the film as a "social justice first," if redounding less to the film's benefit than did the similar claims for Black Panther a year earlier, probably helping as well. The result was an exceptional boost to the film which must be credited with helping it become a $1 billion+ hit. Their absence (because Phase Five is a long way from Phase Three, because a sequel is by definition not a "first"), which makes the film less of an event, means that the drop can be expected to be that much sharper here--hence my use of Black Panther rather than the other Marvel films as a basis for my own projection (though going by the current numbers even that may have been overoptimistic).

3. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had the benefit of considerable good will toward Guardians of the Galaxy 2, whereas Captain Marvel left audiences divided. A Rotten Tomatoes score may have its limitations as an indicator of audience feeling, especially as the claims of a campaign against the film led to the changes in its tabulation of general audience input, but all the same, where Guardians of the Galaxy 2 had an audience score of 87 percent, Captain Marvel had, and has, a mere 45 percent.

4. Captain Marvel 2's promotion has suffered from significant weaknesses. There has already been a delay of the release date (the movie bumped from July to November), connected with claims about reshoots and questionable VFX work (which was a problem for Ant-Man 3), none of which is ever encouraging. The film's budget has recently been treated as something of a scandal (unfairly, I think, but it happened all the same). An early trailer, perhaps reflecting the belated VFX work, made the movie look cheap by MCU standards, and if a later trailer made a more favorable impression that way some damage was probably done. There is also the promise that this will be a relatively goofy MCU movie--an approach that smacks of "tired franchise," and probably did not help Thor 4. The fact of a tie-in with Ms. Marvel may not be helpful (given that the general audience that makes big grosses possible does not want things to get so intricate and sprawling as to require complex investment), while the attempt to broaden the audience by airing the show on the Disney-owned ABC broadcast network so much more widely accessible than Disney Plus has not been a great success. And amid the continuation of the actors' strike the actors have been less visible "on the media circuit," and may remain so, to the film's disadvantage. I cannot see any comparison between this collection of troubles, and the promotional effort for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (which still produced that film's weak opening weekend).

In the face of all that one might still have hoped that Guardians of the Galaxy 3's relatively good reception was indicative of, and conducive to, warmer feeling toward the Marvel brand, and that Captain Marvel 2 would derive some benefit from that--but if it has done that it has not happened in anywhere near the degree that it would need to do to make the movie anything but a flop-in-the-making, at least going by what we see at the moment.

* Screen Rant projected that Captain Marvel 2 would make $950 million in January--while also guessing Ant-Man 3 would be a $1 billion hit, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 take in $1.2 billion. Alas, all that seems very far away now.