Back during the Hollywood strikes of last year the rights of writers and actors with regard to the usage of their work to train the artificial intelligence (AI) that many anticipate replacing some or all of what they do were a key point of contention.
This was an entirely legitimate concern for the writers and actors to have, given that even a slight chance of artificial intelligence doing just that justified their attempting to protect themselves (certainly in the wake of their experience of the streaming boom). Still, as one less bullish than most on the relevant technologies I have been skeptical that the day when AI really could do all that the actors and writers fear (and the executives doubtless hope). After all, consider how in the 1990s we were made to expect that the stars of today would soon be seen interacting with the stars of yesteryear on screen as a matter of course; and just a little while after, that the day had come in which fully computer-generated backgrounds would replace traditional sets. In both cases the technology was oversold--and the fact proved again and again over the years (as when Rogue One presented Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarquin).
However, the chatter surrounding Open AI's Sora is making me wonder if the moment when the technology does start to really matter in the ways they talked about might not actually be so far away. Granted, it is months away from being usable by the public, and thus far produces only short videos with significant imperfections--but it is easy to picture a more developed, more robust, version, backed by human clean-up efforts, enabling a film studio (as against some casual online user) to deliver the equivalent of today's megabudgeted blockbuster fare at considerably lower cost, enough so that they will find it cost-effective to make parts of movies this way, and eventually whole films. The result is that the writers and actors who fought to secure rights within this particular contract battle may have been not only prudent, but prescient, in their stance--and their defeat in that battle potentially catastrophic for their professions.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
David Walsh, His Colleagues, and the Nominees Honored by the 96th Academy Awards
As I have remarked many a time in the past I have consistently found David Walsh and his colleagues the most worthwhile team of film critics publishing in English today. Still, it has seemed to me that for a long time the amount of film reviewing they do has been falling off--especially where major U.S. theatrical releases are concerned. Where maybe a decade ago you would find one new review of such a film every week or so, now one can go for months without seeing a really widely released American film presented here. (Almost three months passed between the reviews of Wes Anderson Asteroid City and Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon.) Reviews of the kinds of movies that can be expected to sell very many tickets, the typical blockbusters (admittedly, not often the occasion of their best work, even if they do now and then present something interesting, as with Walsh's review of Suicide Squad) are especially rare here these days (Avatar: The Way of Water the last such film I noticed getting that attention--over a year ago in January 2023).
All but crowded off the site, with this likely encouraged this year by the attention they have given to both increasing censorship in a time of ascendant "extremism" and increasing conflict, and the historic double-strike by actors and writers in Hollywood this past year, Walsh and his colleagues remain attentive to the "critics' darling" sorts of productions, and continue to do plenty of what they do best in regard to it--exposing the artistic, intellectual and political limitations that leave so much of it just so much Midcult junk, always pretentious and very often truly noxious, churned out by, of and for a very privileged "social layer." This past year they have reviewed all ten of the nominees for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, which not incidentally account for 29 of the 35 nominations in those more prestigious categories recognizing direction, writing and acting--Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Celine Song's Past Lives, Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (getting several of them in very recently, I suppose, to have the whole list covered before the Big Night). While all up to par qualitatively, with the reviews of Triet's Anatomy of a Fall and Glazer's The Zone of Interest especially telling of the state of what passes for intellectual and cultural life these days, the reviews of Nolan's Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things strike me as especially meriting note because in each case a director of whose work they had been very critical in the past managed to win a positive review from them--the only really positive reviews to be found in this lot. (That's right--just two of the ten movies up for Best Picture really deserving of any honors in their books, and a good many of the other eight better discussed as cultural artifacts testifying to the profound derangement of politics, social thought, culture and art in our time than as cinema.)
Will the Academy judge as these critics judged? The Academy's sensibility is very different from this group's--as Walsh never fails to remind his readers in his incisive coverage of the ceremony every year. Still, at last check Oppenheimer had the momentum behind it--and if most of the media seems to find virtues in that film other than those which impressed Walsh (interestingly they seem to think that this movie literally about nuclear war, which the director himself says is about nuclear war, has nothing to do with nuclear war in our time, but rather artificial intelligence) it could at least look like a case of the broken clock striking the right time twice a day--and Walsh's remarks about that should be interesting.
NOTE: This post has been revised and significantly updated twice since its initial February 27, 2024 posting.
All but crowded off the site, with this likely encouraged this year by the attention they have given to both increasing censorship in a time of ascendant "extremism" and increasing conflict, and the historic double-strike by actors and writers in Hollywood this past year, Walsh and his colleagues remain attentive to the "critics' darling" sorts of productions, and continue to do plenty of what they do best in regard to it--exposing the artistic, intellectual and political limitations that leave so much of it just so much Midcult junk, always pretentious and very often truly noxious, churned out by, of and for a very privileged "social layer." This past year they have reviewed all ten of the nominees for Best Picture at this year's Oscars, which not incidentally account for 29 of the 35 nominations in those more prestigious categories recognizing direction, writing and acting--Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall, Greta Gerwig's Barbie, Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, Bradley Cooper's Maestro, Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, Celine Song's Past Lives, Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things and Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (getting several of them in very recently, I suppose, to have the whole list covered before the Big Night). While all up to par qualitatively, with the reviews of Triet's Anatomy of a Fall and Glazer's The Zone of Interest especially telling of the state of what passes for intellectual and cultural life these days, the reviews of Nolan's Oppenheimer and Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things strike me as especially meriting note because in each case a director of whose work they had been very critical in the past managed to win a positive review from them--the only really positive reviews to be found in this lot. (That's right--just two of the ten movies up for Best Picture really deserving of any honors in their books, and a good many of the other eight better discussed as cultural artifacts testifying to the profound derangement of politics, social thought, culture and art in our time than as cinema.)
Will the Academy judge as these critics judged? The Academy's sensibility is very different from this group's--as Walsh never fails to remind his readers in his incisive coverage of the ceremony every year. Still, at last check Oppenheimer had the momentum behind it--and if most of the media seems to find virtues in that film other than those which impressed Walsh (interestingly they seem to think that this movie literally about nuclear war, which the director himself says is about nuclear war, has nothing to do with nuclear war in our time, but rather artificial intelligence) it could at least look like a case of the broken clock striking the right time twice a day--and Walsh's remarks about that should be interesting.
NOTE: This post has been revised and significantly updated twice since its initial February 27, 2024 posting.
The One True X-Men
The live-action X-Men movies Bryan Singer launched with the first film back in 2000 have been an important part of the twenty-first century pop cultural landscape. They have not been the genre's biggest hits in an era in which billion-dollar hits seemed routine for many years. Excluding the affiliated Deadpool movies, the biggest hit the franchise produced was probably 2014's X-Men: Days of Future Past, the $746 million of which falls just short of a billion even in today's inflation-adjusted terms.
Still, the 2000 film helped kickstart the boom in such movies with its then-respectable gross ($157 million domestic and $296 million global, working out to $282 and $528 million, respectively, in January 2024 dollars) two years before the colossal event that was Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man.
Moreover, while the films have not always met the expectations of fans, critics or audiences (there were complaints about Last Stand in 2006, and Wolverine in 2009, and 2019's Dark Phoenix was definitely disappointing, for a start), on the whole the X-Men movies have been well-received, with it saying something of that reception that Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for a quarter of a century now.
Still, I have to admit that all these years later for me the one "true" X-Men adaptation remains the '90s-era (1992-1997) animated series, and it seems natural that it should be so. After all, what can be more natural than that a comic book be rendered through drawn images rather than a live-action adaptation in which much that works in a comic book panel does not work at all?
It is certainly something to think about as the Hollywood studios, unwilling to let go of the revenue stream that superhero films have been until the catastrophes of 2023, and perhaps not wholly unmindful of the success of the recent animated Spider-Man movie (the one real bright spot in the commercial picture genre-wise, not that it seems to get the press one would expect from the fact), may turn in this direction to keep the hits coming in the years ahead.
Still, the 2000 film helped kickstart the boom in such movies with its then-respectable gross ($157 million domestic and $296 million global, working out to $282 and $528 million, respectively, in January 2024 dollars) two years before the colossal event that was Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man.
Moreover, while the films have not always met the expectations of fans, critics or audiences (there were complaints about Last Stand in 2006, and Wolverine in 2009, and 2019's Dark Phoenix was definitely disappointing, for a start), on the whole the X-Men movies have been well-received, with it saying something of that reception that Hugh Jackman has been playing Wolverine for a quarter of a century now.
Still, I have to admit that all these years later for me the one "true" X-Men adaptation remains the '90s-era (1992-1997) animated series, and it seems natural that it should be so. After all, what can be more natural than that a comic book be rendered through drawn images rather than a live-action adaptation in which much that works in a comic book panel does not work at all?
It is certainly something to think about as the Hollywood studios, unwilling to let go of the revenue stream that superhero films have been until the catastrophes of 2023, and perhaps not wholly unmindful of the success of the recent animated Spider-Man movie (the one real bright spot in the commercial picture genre-wise, not that it seems to get the press one would expect from the fact), may turn in this direction to keep the hits coming in the years ahead.
Cory Doctorow's Latest at Pluralistic
I have long found Cory Doctorow a breath of fresh air in a dialogue where discussion of his areas of concentration are dominated by copyright Nazis and Silicon Valley hype-mongerers. And I am pleased to say that in spite of standing by positions anathema to the prejudices of the mainstream media he has now and then managed to secure a platform there from time to time. (I was recently surprised to find his writing on the "enshittification of everything" in the Financial Times.) Still, one would see only very little of what he produces in such places--Doctorow writing prolifically at his own site, Pluralistic, where I consistently find his posts worth not a mere skim, but a proper, word-for-word read.
Of course, having said that some of the pieces are more impressive than others. Last month I was most impressed with his posting on the artificial intelligence bubble, which seems to me even more timely now than it was amid the skyrocketing price of NVIDIA stock).
This month is not quite over at the time of this writing, but I think it safe to say that for me the winner is Doctorow's piece on the demise of Vice, which Doctorow very ably connects with, contrary to the idiot lies peddled by market populism-singing snake oil salesmen for Big Tech back in the absolutely deranged and deranging 1990s, the sewer of predatory practice that the Internet became--inevitably, given that the hard realities of power simply do not cease to operate at the edge of cyberspace.
Of course, having said that some of the pieces are more impressive than others. Last month I was most impressed with his posting on the artificial intelligence bubble, which seems to me even more timely now than it was amid the skyrocketing price of NVIDIA stock).
This month is not quite over at the time of this writing, but I think it safe to say that for me the winner is Doctorow's piece on the demise of Vice, which Doctorow very ably connects with, contrary to the idiot lies peddled by market populism-singing snake oil salesmen for Big Tech back in the absolutely deranged and deranging 1990s, the sewer of predatory practice that the Internet became--inevitably, given that the hard realities of power simply do not cease to operate at the edge of cyberspace.
Just How Much Do Streaming Shows Get Watched After Their Run?
Last year Kimiko Glenn's sharing her residual check for her work on the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black during the actors' (and writer's) strike on TikTok got a lot of attention.
The document she presented showed that for her 44 episodes of work on the show that quarter she got . . . $27.30 cents.
This was, of course, reflective of just how tough those within that profession have it--even those who may seem as if they have "made it" (such as one would assume to be the case with someone appearing in so much of a hit series).
Yet, especially given the comparative novelty and obscurity of the process by which success in streaming is evaluated (it is a lot harder to judge this than, for instance, box office gross or Nielsen ratings), it has also occurred to me that it may reflect the changing dynamics of "content" transmission.
Again, there was a time when reruns of hit shows (and even not-so-hit shows) were a much more significant part of the viewing and pop cultural diet of the public. This was why we all knew that a beard like Mr. Spock has in "Mirror, Mirror" indicates the evil version of such a character; why wherever we go people still reference Seinfeld and the "golden age" of The Simpsons; why making feature films out of, for example, The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible seemed like a plausible basis for a hit.
It was all part of a less crowded, less fragmented, media world than the one we now live in--where people watched the same shows over and over again, the contents became a part of their frame of reference, and that in turn kept people looking at them, especially insofar as they still had a limited range of options (fewer channels, carrying less original new material, and so filling their hours with a good deal of old content). By contrast the way content made for premium streaming especially is fenced off from all but the subscribing audience (in contrast with old sitcoms that you might just run into on multiple channels) makes it less accessible to begin with; the hyper-abundance of options at all times that always includes a veritable onslaught of new choices; and perhaps the slighter "rewatch" value of what we get in an age which seems to have forgotten all about, or rejected, old-fashioned easy viewing and its pleasures; makes it harder and harder for anything to entrench itself "in the zeitgeist," either on a first airing or through being seen over and over again.
The result is that while I do not doubt for a moment the exploitative character of contemporary production, Ms. Glenn's check may also, in its way, hint that just a few years on that show millions were watching is being looked at it comparatively little, certainly in comparison with those old staples of prime time TV that became staples of non-prime TV in time.
The document she presented showed that for her 44 episodes of work on the show that quarter she got . . . $27.30 cents.
This was, of course, reflective of just how tough those within that profession have it--even those who may seem as if they have "made it" (such as one would assume to be the case with someone appearing in so much of a hit series).
Yet, especially given the comparative novelty and obscurity of the process by which success in streaming is evaluated (it is a lot harder to judge this than, for instance, box office gross or Nielsen ratings), it has also occurred to me that it may reflect the changing dynamics of "content" transmission.
Again, there was a time when reruns of hit shows (and even not-so-hit shows) were a much more significant part of the viewing and pop cultural diet of the public. This was why we all knew that a beard like Mr. Spock has in "Mirror, Mirror" indicates the evil version of such a character; why wherever we go people still reference Seinfeld and the "golden age" of The Simpsons; why making feature films out of, for example, The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible seemed like a plausible basis for a hit.
It was all part of a less crowded, less fragmented, media world than the one we now live in--where people watched the same shows over and over again, the contents became a part of their frame of reference, and that in turn kept people looking at them, especially insofar as they still had a limited range of options (fewer channels, carrying less original new material, and so filling their hours with a good deal of old content). By contrast the way content made for premium streaming especially is fenced off from all but the subscribing audience (in contrast with old sitcoms that you might just run into on multiple channels) makes it less accessible to begin with; the hyper-abundance of options at all times that always includes a veritable onslaught of new choices; and perhaps the slighter "rewatch" value of what we get in an age which seems to have forgotten all about, or rejected, old-fashioned easy viewing and its pleasures; makes it harder and harder for anything to entrench itself "in the zeitgeist," either on a first airing or through being seen over and over again.
The result is that while I do not doubt for a moment the exploitative character of contemporary production, Ms. Glenn's check may also, in its way, hint that just a few years on that show millions were watching is being looked at it comparatively little, certainly in comparison with those old staples of prime time TV that became staples of non-prime TV in time.
Wall Street is Acting Like the Singularity is Here (Again)
A couple of years ago, considering in hindsight the way that the capitalization of the stock market exploded in 1994-1999 (growing 20 percent a year), it seemed to me that in its "irrational exuberance" Wall Street was acting as if the Singularity had arrived.
So does it seem to me now as the price of NVIDIA's stock soars.
Where its share price was $50-$60 at the end of 2019, and amid the ups and downs of the subsequent pandemic (which had its share of financial insanity as the Federal Reserve turned on the monetary spigot--remember the Gamestop stock foolishness?) topped out at about $300 before dropping into the $100-$200 range in late 2022, has surged from that point to stand at $788 now, more than ten times its late 2019 value even after adjustment for inflation.
The story goes that this is all because NVIDIA's prominence as a maker of AI (Artificial Intelligence) chips.
It is probable that very, very few of those involved in these machinations have any idea what AI chips actually are, but they are excited because they know they have something to do with artificial intelligence, hype about which has gone through the roof and beyond since Open AI's release of Chat-GPT amid a frenzy of media claquing (with even the "awful warning" stuff of the credulous Ezra Klein variety playing its part), and that is good enough for them.
For now.
For my part, I remain, as I was last year, less impressed with the technology and its possibilities, Cory Doctorow summing up the situation all too succinctly when he observe[s] that "we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job," as you are likely reminded every time you call customer service, get a phone tree, and then beg to talk to a human.
So does it seem to me now as the price of NVIDIA's stock soars.
Where its share price was $50-$60 at the end of 2019, and amid the ups and downs of the subsequent pandemic (which had its share of financial insanity as the Federal Reserve turned on the monetary spigot--remember the Gamestop stock foolishness?) topped out at about $300 before dropping into the $100-$200 range in late 2022, has surged from that point to stand at $788 now, more than ten times its late 2019 value even after adjustment for inflation.
The story goes that this is all because NVIDIA's prominence as a maker of AI (Artificial Intelligence) chips.
It is probable that very, very few of those involved in these machinations have any idea what AI chips actually are, but they are excited because they know they have something to do with artificial intelligence, hype about which has gone through the roof and beyond since Open AI's release of Chat-GPT amid a frenzy of media claquing (with even the "awful warning" stuff of the credulous Ezra Klein variety playing its part), and that is good enough for them.
For now.
For my part, I remain, as I was last year, less impressed with the technology and its possibilities, Cory Doctorow summing up the situation all too succinctly when he observe[s] that "we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job," as you are likely reminded every time you call customer service, get a phone tree, and then beg to talk to a human.
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
Can Hollywood Survive the Demise of its "Blockbuster" Filmmaking Model?
As I have remarked many a time (because the claqueurs and courtiers of the entertainment press are so much in denial about this) what Hollywood has been looking at since 2023 is a crisis not just of the superhero film ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), even if that is the most conspicuous aspect of the situation, but a crisis of its filmmaking generally--and in particular a crisis of the high concept model that has prevailed since the 1970s that has so come to center on franchise-driven sci-fi-inclined action movies, and lavish animation tending toward family audiences and musical comedy.
Accordingly, while others are asking "Can the Studios Retool their Superhero Movies so they can be Winners Again?" I think it more worthwhile to ask "Can Hollywood Survive the Demise of its Filmmaking Model for the Last Half Century?"
That question leads to two others, namely "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-going?" and "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?"
Why does the question of the blockbuster model lead to the others? Where "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-Going" is concerned the simple answer is that since the advent of television plunged Hollywood into crisis in the 1950s, and sent theatergoing plummeting (between 1948 and 1969 Americans went from going to the theater thirty times a year to doing so just four times a year, which has remained the average), the kind of movie we identify with the blockbuster is what has kept Americans going to theaters at all--with its one last card left to play the offer of big-screen spectacle, mainly of the sci-fi action-adventure and splashy animated extravaganza types.
Consider what this means in actual dollars and cents terms. In the years before the pandemic (2015-2019) domestic ticket sales came to about $14 billion a year in today's terms, half of which money the studios got--with this increasingly coming from the blockbusters (the top ten movies alone accounting for about two-fifths of the ticket sales by the end of that period). Those theatrical successes, one should add, were also the basis for big earnings from post-theatrical revenue, as with streaming and home entertainment generally (which often added almost as much to a movie's bottom line as the studio's cut of ticket sales); and money from spin-offs and merchandising; while the domestic earnings were typically more than matched by what the movies made overseas in the case of these kinds of films.
As the studio executives learned the hard way after many, many losses, the economics of straight-to-streaming releases simply do not allow for that kind of money-making--such that they found that funding blockbuster-budgeted straight-to-streaming releases did little but run up their debts, and have since tended toward smaller projects in that medium (to the point of finding a Batgirl, too small for theaters, too pricey for streaming, and just burying the movie). Indeed, streaming success often seems a reflection of cinematic success. (For all its undeniable failures, where would Disney Plus' line-up be without the cinematic success of Star Wars and Marvel?) Certainly it says something that people will watch a streaming spin-off to a cinematic hit, but that tying a theatrically released movie too closely to a streaming show is self-defeating (as Marvel demonstrated time and again, with Dr. Strange 2, and Captain Marvel 2).
In short, without the blockbuster studios have little to keep people coming to theaters--while without the money to be made from the theatrical release and all to which it can lead the blockbuster makes little economic sense--leading to the second question "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?" For the blockbuster was Hollywood's area of "comparative advantage" relative to the rest of the world's film-making. Others could make, for example, a small domestic drama or romantic comedy that would play in their home market just as well as Hollywood fare of the type, or even better because it was made just for that country and its culture. They could not match Hollywood's big budgets and the spectacle they bought with any regularity until at least very recently (when the growing wealth of China's domestic market, and the determination of the Chinese government to develop this particular industry, had the country backing such movies), all as Hollywood retained a global advantage with regard to stars, franchises, business relationships and the rest. Without the blockbusters Hollywood has that much less to offer the rest of the world--and becomes just one more movie-making outfit on a planet full of such outfits clamoring for an audience that are in other ways no less dynamic, and perhaps more so. (Consider, for instance, the successes that Japanese animation, or Korean film and television, have enjoyed in the international market as of late.)
Can Hollywood survive the demise of its model for making big hits, generally and in relation to its position within a global cinematic marketplace? Yes . . . but most likely as a shadow of its former self, a much-reduced industry living on smaller productions with ever less cachet than before outside North America; a bigger version of, for instance, British film and television, rather than the Center of the Media Universe that it was in its twentieth century glory days. The result is that for Hollywood overcoming the crisis of its model in one way or another--either finding a way to keep that model viable, or finding a substitute that similarly plays to its strength--has the highest of stakes, all as they are led by, well, not heroes to "match the mighty hour." Indeed, I can picture a couple of decades from today Tinseltown's executive suites packed with old men and women mentally stuck in a past more congenial to their sense of self-importance, or grumbling bitterly about how things were "Back in my day," until they drive to distraction the younger persons around them holding what remains of the industry together.
Accordingly, while others are asking "Can the Studios Retool their Superhero Movies so they can be Winners Again?" I think it more worthwhile to ask "Can Hollywood Survive the Demise of its Filmmaking Model for the Last Half Century?"
That question leads to two others, namely "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-going?" and "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?"
Why does the question of the blockbuster model lead to the others? Where "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-Going" is concerned the simple answer is that since the advent of television plunged Hollywood into crisis in the 1950s, and sent theatergoing plummeting (between 1948 and 1969 Americans went from going to the theater thirty times a year to doing so just four times a year, which has remained the average), the kind of movie we identify with the blockbuster is what has kept Americans going to theaters at all--with its one last card left to play the offer of big-screen spectacle, mainly of the sci-fi action-adventure and splashy animated extravaganza types.
Consider what this means in actual dollars and cents terms. In the years before the pandemic (2015-2019) domestic ticket sales came to about $14 billion a year in today's terms, half of which money the studios got--with this increasingly coming from the blockbusters (the top ten movies alone accounting for about two-fifths of the ticket sales by the end of that period). Those theatrical successes, one should add, were also the basis for big earnings from post-theatrical revenue, as with streaming and home entertainment generally (which often added almost as much to a movie's bottom line as the studio's cut of ticket sales); and money from spin-offs and merchandising; while the domestic earnings were typically more than matched by what the movies made overseas in the case of these kinds of films.
As the studio executives learned the hard way after many, many losses, the economics of straight-to-streaming releases simply do not allow for that kind of money-making--such that they found that funding blockbuster-budgeted straight-to-streaming releases did little but run up their debts, and have since tended toward smaller projects in that medium (to the point of finding a Batgirl, too small for theaters, too pricey for streaming, and just burying the movie). Indeed, streaming success often seems a reflection of cinematic success. (For all its undeniable failures, where would Disney Plus' line-up be without the cinematic success of Star Wars and Marvel?) Certainly it says something that people will watch a streaming spin-off to a cinematic hit, but that tying a theatrically released movie too closely to a streaming show is self-defeating (as Marvel demonstrated time and again, with Dr. Strange 2, and Captain Marvel 2).
In short, without the blockbuster studios have little to keep people coming to theaters--while without the money to be made from the theatrical release and all to which it can lead the blockbuster makes little economic sense--leading to the second question "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?" For the blockbuster was Hollywood's area of "comparative advantage" relative to the rest of the world's film-making. Others could make, for example, a small domestic drama or romantic comedy that would play in their home market just as well as Hollywood fare of the type, or even better because it was made just for that country and its culture. They could not match Hollywood's big budgets and the spectacle they bought with any regularity until at least very recently (when the growing wealth of China's domestic market, and the determination of the Chinese government to develop this particular industry, had the country backing such movies), all as Hollywood retained a global advantage with regard to stars, franchises, business relationships and the rest. Without the blockbusters Hollywood has that much less to offer the rest of the world--and becomes just one more movie-making outfit on a planet full of such outfits clamoring for an audience that are in other ways no less dynamic, and perhaps more so. (Consider, for instance, the successes that Japanese animation, or Korean film and television, have enjoyed in the international market as of late.)
Can Hollywood survive the demise of its model for making big hits, generally and in relation to its position within a global cinematic marketplace? Yes . . . but most likely as a shadow of its former self, a much-reduced industry living on smaller productions with ever less cachet than before outside North America; a bigger version of, for instance, British film and television, rather than the Center of the Media Universe that it was in its twentieth century glory days. The result is that for Hollywood overcoming the crisis of its model in one way or another--either finding a way to keep that model viable, or finding a substitute that similarly plays to its strength--has the highest of stakes, all as they are led by, well, not heroes to "match the mighty hour." Indeed, I can picture a couple of decades from today Tinseltown's executive suites packed with old men and women mentally stuck in a past more congenial to their sense of self-importance, or grumbling bitterly about how things were "Back in my day," until they drive to distraction the younger persons around them holding what remains of the industry together.
James McDonald Reviews The Best American Short Stories 2023
Last year the literary critic James McDonald asked "Where is Our Zola?"
A partial answer to his question would seem to be "Not in The Best American Short Stories 2023" to go by his review of that collection last week, the subtitle of which is "A Step Backward," referring to the movement of the included stories and authors away from meaningfully dealing with the world in which we live.
McDonald also leaves no room for doubt about the reason for the unhappy situation--namely that longtime editor Heidi Pitlor, more or less in line with the tendency of the "scene" to which she belongs, "speaks for an affluent segment of the population . . . academia . . . the publishing business," such that while she has "a good ear for sentences" (the Cult of the Sentence strikes again!) her "social outlook ventures no further than upper middle class preoccupations such as identity politics," with all the blinkers implied about her and her colleagues' perspective. (In pointing this out McDonald incisively points to Pitlor's remark about how in the pandemic "we were all working . . . at home"--the reality for editors and suchlike, but not for working-class folks, and a good many non-working-class people besides.)
Particularly worth noting is McDonald's challenge to the claim of the anthology that it presents "the best" stories of the year. As McDonald notes, what we have here are a mere twenty stories, three-quarters of them taken from a mere half dozen publications, and a fifth from just one. (Four stories from The New Yorker. Ugh.) A case of looking for one's keys under a streetlight, the extreme elitism of the presumption (that what is "best" is to be found in this tiny and extremely exclusive slice of even what the literary magazines have carried), is "hard to maintain," even before one takes into account the intellectual limitations of those making the selection --a thought I have had myself back when I was reviewing "best of year" anthologies with some regularity. Back then, because I had already come to understand how unbelievably closed the magazines and publishing generally are to the vast majority of would-be authors, and still had illusions that the web would provide the excluded some chance to be heard (long since crushed), I picked up such volumes hoping to see that by way of some obscure online outlet some gem came to the notice of the world and was recognized by inclusion there (or at least, that we had something from an author truly from outside the "club"). I was disappointed every time--and dare say that nothing has changed since. I dare say, too, that just as this seems to me one of the factors that has left science fiction increasingly stagnant, so has it been unhelpful from the standpoint of the long overdue regeneration of a contemporary literature.
A partial answer to his question would seem to be "Not in The Best American Short Stories 2023" to go by his review of that collection last week, the subtitle of which is "A Step Backward," referring to the movement of the included stories and authors away from meaningfully dealing with the world in which we live.
McDonald also leaves no room for doubt about the reason for the unhappy situation--namely that longtime editor Heidi Pitlor, more or less in line with the tendency of the "scene" to which she belongs, "speaks for an affluent segment of the population . . . academia . . . the publishing business," such that while she has "a good ear for sentences" (the Cult of the Sentence strikes again!) her "social outlook ventures no further than upper middle class preoccupations such as identity politics," with all the blinkers implied about her and her colleagues' perspective. (In pointing this out McDonald incisively points to Pitlor's remark about how in the pandemic "we were all working . . . at home"--the reality for editors and suchlike, but not for working-class folks, and a good many non-working-class people besides.)
Particularly worth noting is McDonald's challenge to the claim of the anthology that it presents "the best" stories of the year. As McDonald notes, what we have here are a mere twenty stories, three-quarters of them taken from a mere half dozen publications, and a fifth from just one. (Four stories from The New Yorker. Ugh.) A case of looking for one's keys under a streetlight, the extreme elitism of the presumption (that what is "best" is to be found in this tiny and extremely exclusive slice of even what the literary magazines have carried), is "hard to maintain," even before one takes into account the intellectual limitations of those making the selection --a thought I have had myself back when I was reviewing "best of year" anthologies with some regularity. Back then, because I had already come to understand how unbelievably closed the magazines and publishing generally are to the vast majority of would-be authors, and still had illusions that the web would provide the excluded some chance to be heard (long since crushed), I picked up such volumes hoping to see that by way of some obscure online outlet some gem came to the notice of the world and was recognized by inclusion there (or at least, that we had something from an author truly from outside the "club"). I was disappointed every time--and dare say that nothing has changed since. I dare say, too, that just as this seems to me one of the factors that has left science fiction increasingly stagnant, so has it been unhelpful from the standpoint of the long overdue regeneration of a contemporary literature.
Thursday, February 15, 2024
The Deadpool and Wolverine Trailer: Some Thoughts
Deadpool's first appearance on film was in 2009's Wolverine. Of course there was no direct follow-up, but Deadpool did get his own movie seven years later as part of FOX's broader X-Men franchise, and now in the threequel (which has seen that franchise folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) just as FOX has been folded into the Disney portfolio) Deadpool and Wolverine are together again--hence the title the studio is going with for what many have up to now simply been calling "Deadpool 3," as we can see in the recently released trailer.
What can I say about it? It strikes me that the movie endeavors to retain the spirit of the Deadpool franchise, while extending that ceaselessly fourth wall-breaking, "ironic," attitude to the goings-on to the bigger MCU of which the figure is now a part, as Deadpool reminds us within the first few seconds of the trailer. (A throwaway quip highlights that this is a Disney production . . . in an entirely Deadpool way that I will refrain from repeating here.) Indeed, the trailer struck me as more interested in impressing the metafictional aspect of the movie on us than in giving us a very good understanding of just what is going on here.
Will it bring in the fans?
Being less enthused of Deadpool's antics than most I may not be the best judge of that. I expect hardcore Deadpool fans will be enticed by what they see here--but it, of course, takes more than bringing out the hardcore fans to score the kind of billion-dollar gross the original Deadpool did (when its ticket sales are adjusted for current prices), a feat which has been very, very elusive for movies of this kind this past year. I expect that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine being an important part of the proceedings will help somewhat, but let us not forget that along with the MCU the X-Men franchise of which he was a part also became very well-worn even before the pandemic did its damage to the box office. (Remember 2019's very ill-received Dark Phoenix?) Accordingly I stand by my earlier prediction for now--an extreme range of $150 million-$700 million for the global gross, with $400-$450 million seeming to me the portion of that in which the movie is most likely to finish up.
What can I say about it? It strikes me that the movie endeavors to retain the spirit of the Deadpool franchise, while extending that ceaselessly fourth wall-breaking, "ironic," attitude to the goings-on to the bigger MCU of which the figure is now a part, as Deadpool reminds us within the first few seconds of the trailer. (A throwaway quip highlights that this is a Disney production . . . in an entirely Deadpool way that I will refrain from repeating here.) Indeed, the trailer struck me as more interested in impressing the metafictional aspect of the movie on us than in giving us a very good understanding of just what is going on here.
Will it bring in the fans?
Being less enthused of Deadpool's antics than most I may not be the best judge of that. I expect hardcore Deadpool fans will be enticed by what they see here--but it, of course, takes more than bringing out the hardcore fans to score the kind of billion-dollar gross the original Deadpool did (when its ticket sales are adjusted for current prices), a feat which has been very, very elusive for movies of this kind this past year. I expect that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine being an important part of the proceedings will help somewhat, but let us not forget that along with the MCU the X-Men franchise of which he was a part also became very well-worn even before the pandemic did its damage to the box office. (Remember 2019's very ill-received Dark Phoenix?) Accordingly I stand by my earlier prediction for now--an extreme range of $150 million-$700 million for the global gross, with $400-$450 million seeming to me the portion of that in which the movie is most likely to finish up.
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
A Few Thoughts on the Box Office in 2024 (So Far)
As I remarked in a recent post the January 2024 box office has been, to put it mildly, disappointing for Hollywood. Rather than improving on last year as might have been hoped in a situation of continuing "recovery," adjusted for inflation gross ticket sales were down 18 percent from January 2023--and indeed, down by at least half compared with the pre-pandemic average (2015-2020).
Yes, half.
Part of the story, admittedly, is that the holiday season preceding it was very weak, the recovery in revenues evident in the spring and summer slowing greatly in the fall as franchise films (Captain Marvel, Aquaman, etc.) continued to fall flat with audiences, but, in spite of overperformance by hits like Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film, none of them grew into a Super Mario Bros. or Barbie (or even Oppenheimer or animated Spider-Man)-scale event of the kind adequate to rescue the season. Indeed, the highest-grossing movie to come out in the last five months of the year was actually Wonka, which (on the way to merely sputtering past the $200 million mark) collected about $63 million in January--as against the $283 million that Avatar 2 collected the same month the year before (after having already taken in $400 million in the last days of December).
However, it was also a matter of January's offerings being less than thrilling for the public. The highest-grossing January release by far, the remake of Mean Girls, is exemplary. The original 2004 Mean Girls collected some $86 million at the domestic box office--equal to $140 million when adjusted for December 2023 prices. As of its fourth weekend in domestic play, with not much further to go, the new version has made less than half that ($66 million).
Also indicative of the situation is what has come thus far of the attempt of a very cash-hungry Disney desperate for some success in its traditional domain of animated feature film after these last terrible years to exploit January's long being a good time for rereleases by putting out the three big Pixar movies that lost their chance at a big theatrical gross due to the pandemic. Soul, the first in the schedule, had its release back on January 12, in a not insignificant 1,360 theaters.
The movie made a million dollars--almost.
Not almost a billion, almost a million.
This bodes poorly indeed for the next film in the queue, the culture war-stoking Turning Red (due out Friday), all as February has already proven dismayingly January-like. This weekend the megabudgeted ($200 million+) Argylle, which may have come from Apple+ but really only makes financial sense as a blockbuster, came out with low expectations, and failed to meet them. (Boxoffice Pro projected $20-$30 million in its long-range forecast. The movie took in a mere $18 million.)
Looking at the film I am reminded that while it is not a franchise movie of the kind that have been flopping left and right since about this same time last year one of the reasons why we had so many franchise films in the first place was because it had in this crowded, post-star, market become so difficult to get people to the theaters to see non-franchise films, even when they are big action movies.
That gross is a reminder, too, that if the difficulties of Argylle's particular genre are still getting less attention than those of the superhero film, the "spy-fi" action-adventure genre (as we already saw with the waning salability of James Bond, and the underperformance of the latest Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible films last year) is likewise running out of steam, the boom that began in the '90s now going bust.
Alas, given what is evidently in the pipeline this is far from being the last such disappointment--all as Madame Web seems set to fix attention back on the superhero genre's troubles as it continues the genre's trend of falling grosses, and contribute to a weak February following the weak January the year has already seen.
Yes, half.
Part of the story, admittedly, is that the holiday season preceding it was very weak, the recovery in revenues evident in the spring and summer slowing greatly in the fall as franchise films (Captain Marvel, Aquaman, etc.) continued to fall flat with audiences, but, in spite of overperformance by hits like Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film, none of them grew into a Super Mario Bros. or Barbie (or even Oppenheimer or animated Spider-Man)-scale event of the kind adequate to rescue the season. Indeed, the highest-grossing movie to come out in the last five months of the year was actually Wonka, which (on the way to merely sputtering past the $200 million mark) collected about $63 million in January--as against the $283 million that Avatar 2 collected the same month the year before (after having already taken in $400 million in the last days of December).
However, it was also a matter of January's offerings being less than thrilling for the public. The highest-grossing January release by far, the remake of Mean Girls, is exemplary. The original 2004 Mean Girls collected some $86 million at the domestic box office--equal to $140 million when adjusted for December 2023 prices. As of its fourth weekend in domestic play, with not much further to go, the new version has made less than half that ($66 million).
Also indicative of the situation is what has come thus far of the attempt of a very cash-hungry Disney desperate for some success in its traditional domain of animated feature film after these last terrible years to exploit January's long being a good time for rereleases by putting out the three big Pixar movies that lost their chance at a big theatrical gross due to the pandemic. Soul, the first in the schedule, had its release back on January 12, in a not insignificant 1,360 theaters.
The movie made a million dollars--almost.
Not almost a billion, almost a million.
This bodes poorly indeed for the next film in the queue, the culture war-stoking Turning Red (due out Friday), all as February has already proven dismayingly January-like. This weekend the megabudgeted ($200 million+) Argylle, which may have come from Apple+ but really only makes financial sense as a blockbuster, came out with low expectations, and failed to meet them. (Boxoffice Pro projected $20-$30 million in its long-range forecast. The movie took in a mere $18 million.)
Looking at the film I am reminded that while it is not a franchise movie of the kind that have been flopping left and right since about this same time last year one of the reasons why we had so many franchise films in the first place was because it had in this crowded, post-star, market become so difficult to get people to the theaters to see non-franchise films, even when they are big action movies.
That gross is a reminder, too, that if the difficulties of Argylle's particular genre are still getting less attention than those of the superhero film, the "spy-fi" action-adventure genre (as we already saw with the waning salability of James Bond, and the underperformance of the latest Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible films last year) is likewise running out of steam, the boom that began in the '90s now going bust.
Alas, given what is evidently in the pipeline this is far from being the last such disappointment--all as Madame Web seems set to fix attention back on the superhero genre's troubles as it continues the genre's trend of falling grosses, and contribute to a weak February following the weak January the year has already seen.
Another Surprising Movie Review from David Walsh (of Yorgos Lanthimos Poor Things)
Reading about Poor Things in advance of the film's debut I expected a piece of postmodernist tripe. This is all the more in as it comes from Yorgos Lanthimos, director of such films as The Lobster, and The Favourite, aptly characterized by David Walsh as "marked by an overall chilly and self-conscious idiosyncrasy, and occasional misanthropy"--in the case of The Lobster a "facile misanthropy" that Walsh recognizes all too correctly as "one of the 'default settings'" of "independent" film.
The result is that I was very surprised to see Walsh present a very positive review of the movie as not only technically accomplished in respects or having the benefit of good performances (though he does praise both aspects of the film), but as a work which is humane in sensibility and socially critical in a meaningful way.
This is the second time in the space of about half a year that Walsh has surprised me with a favorable review of a major director of whose work he had been consistently very critical in the past--and indeed praised for eschewing the cheap irony and misanthropy that have been dominant since at least the '90s to take on serious subjects, seriously. (The other director he praised on such grounds was Christopher Nolan, whose Oppenheimer Walsh praised very highly.)
Considering this I find myself thinking of how many times we have heard about the "end of irony" these past several decades. Could the changing attitudes of filmmakers like Lanthimos and Nolan be a sign that we are really moving past that, perhaps because the world really is in a bad way, and the irony with which a certain kind of pseudo-intellectual has long blown off the fact has lost the last of whatever credibility it ever had for all save the truly, incurably, "ironic?" And that filmmakers (perhaps, along with many, many others) are really and truly starting to abandon the vanity, smugness, irresponsibility that are the great attractions of the ironic stance in favor of actual engagement with the world--and in doing so going after "bigger game" than the kind of subject matter so compelling to (to name but one example) the Gerwig loyalists? I reserve judgment about that for now--but it is something to watch for in the years ahead.
The result is that I was very surprised to see Walsh present a very positive review of the movie as not only technically accomplished in respects or having the benefit of good performances (though he does praise both aspects of the film), but as a work which is humane in sensibility and socially critical in a meaningful way.
This is the second time in the space of about half a year that Walsh has surprised me with a favorable review of a major director of whose work he had been consistently very critical in the past--and indeed praised for eschewing the cheap irony and misanthropy that have been dominant since at least the '90s to take on serious subjects, seriously. (The other director he praised on such grounds was Christopher Nolan, whose Oppenheimer Walsh praised very highly.)
Considering this I find myself thinking of how many times we have heard about the "end of irony" these past several decades. Could the changing attitudes of filmmakers like Lanthimos and Nolan be a sign that we are really moving past that, perhaps because the world really is in a bad way, and the irony with which a certain kind of pseudo-intellectual has long blown off the fact has lost the last of whatever credibility it ever had for all save the truly, incurably, "ironic?" And that filmmakers (perhaps, along with many, many others) are really and truly starting to abandon the vanity, smugness, irresponsibility that are the great attractions of the ironic stance in favor of actual engagement with the world--and in doing so going after "bigger game" than the kind of subject matter so compelling to (to name but one example) the Gerwig loyalists? I reserve judgment about that for now--but it is something to watch for in the years ahead.
Friday, February 2, 2024
The Intensity of the Reaction to Greta Gerwig's Non-Nomination for Best Director
In light of the earlier hoopla for Barbie I was surprised when Greta Gerwig did not get a Best Director nomination for helming the film--and then completely unsurprised by the extremity of the "We was robbed!" reaction from her supporters.
This was in part because we see this kind of thing every year, for multiple films, if not always at the same level of volume and intensity. And that makes it worth saying something about that reaction as an example of a tendency I have written about in the past, namely just how disproportionate the volume and intensity of chatter about pop cultural product can be.
It seemed to me writing then that four factors were specifically noteworthy, namely
1. The Frame of Mind of an Audience Looking for Entertainment.
2. The Ascent of "Fan" Material in the Marketplace.
3. The Marketing of Popular Culture.
4. The Media's Obsession With Itself.
Spelled out in brief this means that:
People take their entertainment in a state of emotional vulnerability (they are sitting down to relax, letting their guard down, generally expecting to be pandered to), with all that means when things do (as when they are absolutely pandered to) or do not (as when they are slapped in the face instead) go the way they would like.
It is also the case that much of popular culture is connected with franchises whose members are more than usually emotionally invested in the material coming to the movie--to the point that one can say that they feel like they "own" it and are owed something by those who would create something out of it--amplifying their reaction to what is done with it, negative reaction included. And,
Finally a self-obsessed media relentlessly exploits controversy, and with it provocations and other expressions of ill will, in promoting its products, and itself, doing everything to feed a frenzy which eventually feeds on itself. (We see this even in such things as the way that people constantly use box office data to try and prove that the public is on whatever side of the argument they happen to be.)
Still, relevant as all this seems there is the plain and simple fact of what so much of the pandering and the offenses and the controversy has to do with these days (and certainly had to do with in the case of Barbie), what Richard Hofstadter called "status politics." Centering on issues of group status within society at large in ways not allowing of redress in any practical, material, way status politics (in contrast with "interest politics" where people have problems that are in a technical sense redressable) tends toward lingering on bad memories, bitterness, etc., and all that easily follows from them--not least a tendency to accord immense symbolic significance to minor matters, see offense anywhere and everywhere, make accusations accordingly, and treat any objection to one's behavior (that they may be acting unfairly toward others, for example) with complete contempt. (Postmodernism has, of course, reinforced this with its worship of "subjectivity," which basically means that people feel their selfishness and prejudices are sacrosanct, and no one can have a valid opinion contrary to their own--their "subjectivity" the only one that matters, or even exists.)
Certainly going by how many have viewed the film, from all sides of the culture war, as all but designed to stoke such politics; and certainly the way the movie was promoted, and large portions of the media embraced it; only encouraged this. The resulting, extreme, success of the movie at pushing "hot buttons" made the movie a hot button topic itself, and how the movie has been treated by the Academy (even if this remains to be fully seen) itself a status politics issue, with all the intensity that this prompts. That is to say that for status politics-minded "supporters" of the movie Gerwig's not getting nominated becomes about much, much more than one director not being up for one prize in one particular year. It was for them a test of the Academy's readiness to recognize equity across gender lines among filmmakers, and more fully display its respect for their understanding of social justice more broadly; and the Academy's declining Gerwig the nomination, even as they accorded the film so many other honors (in part, perhaps, because the movie having a Best Picture nod without Best Director or Best Actress can make the Best Picture nomination look like an empty gesture toward big movies, as with the one for Top Gun 2 last year), a refusal to do all those things in their view. Of course, even understanding the reasoning here not everyone will see it as valid--to regard it as plausible for them to attribute so much meaning to one prize--but again, such differences in attitude are in the nature of such politics.
This was in part because we see this kind of thing every year, for multiple films, if not always at the same level of volume and intensity. And that makes it worth saying something about that reaction as an example of a tendency I have written about in the past, namely just how disproportionate the volume and intensity of chatter about pop cultural product can be.
It seemed to me writing then that four factors were specifically noteworthy, namely
1. The Frame of Mind of an Audience Looking for Entertainment.
2. The Ascent of "Fan" Material in the Marketplace.
3. The Marketing of Popular Culture.
4. The Media's Obsession With Itself.
Spelled out in brief this means that:
People take their entertainment in a state of emotional vulnerability (they are sitting down to relax, letting their guard down, generally expecting to be pandered to), with all that means when things do (as when they are absolutely pandered to) or do not (as when they are slapped in the face instead) go the way they would like.
It is also the case that much of popular culture is connected with franchises whose members are more than usually emotionally invested in the material coming to the movie--to the point that one can say that they feel like they "own" it and are owed something by those who would create something out of it--amplifying their reaction to what is done with it, negative reaction included. And,
Finally a self-obsessed media relentlessly exploits controversy, and with it provocations and other expressions of ill will, in promoting its products, and itself, doing everything to feed a frenzy which eventually feeds on itself. (We see this even in such things as the way that people constantly use box office data to try and prove that the public is on whatever side of the argument they happen to be.)
Still, relevant as all this seems there is the plain and simple fact of what so much of the pandering and the offenses and the controversy has to do with these days (and certainly had to do with in the case of Barbie), what Richard Hofstadter called "status politics." Centering on issues of group status within society at large in ways not allowing of redress in any practical, material, way status politics (in contrast with "interest politics" where people have problems that are in a technical sense redressable) tends toward lingering on bad memories, bitterness, etc., and all that easily follows from them--not least a tendency to accord immense symbolic significance to minor matters, see offense anywhere and everywhere, make accusations accordingly, and treat any objection to one's behavior (that they may be acting unfairly toward others, for example) with complete contempt. (Postmodernism has, of course, reinforced this with its worship of "subjectivity," which basically means that people feel their selfishness and prejudices are sacrosanct, and no one can have a valid opinion contrary to their own--their "subjectivity" the only one that matters, or even exists.)
Certainly going by how many have viewed the film, from all sides of the culture war, as all but designed to stoke such politics; and certainly the way the movie was promoted, and large portions of the media embraced it; only encouraged this. The resulting, extreme, success of the movie at pushing "hot buttons" made the movie a hot button topic itself, and how the movie has been treated by the Academy (even if this remains to be fully seen) itself a status politics issue, with all the intensity that this prompts. That is to say that for status politics-minded "supporters" of the movie Gerwig's not getting nominated becomes about much, much more than one director not being up for one prize in one particular year. It was for them a test of the Academy's readiness to recognize equity across gender lines among filmmakers, and more fully display its respect for their understanding of social justice more broadly; and the Academy's declining Gerwig the nomination, even as they accorded the film so many other honors (in part, perhaps, because the movie having a Best Picture nod without Best Director or Best Actress can make the Best Picture nomination look like an empty gesture toward big movies, as with the one for Top Gun 2 last year), a refusal to do all those things in their view. Of course, even understanding the reasoning here not everyone will see it as valid--to regard it as plausible for them to attribute so much meaning to one prize--but again, such differences in attitude are in the nature of such politics.
The Theme Song for The Fall Guy
Recently thinking about The Fall Guy's old theme song I took another look at "The Unknown Stuntman," and, yeah, I'm reminded not just of how much that memorable theme seems to comport with a spirit other than the one the trailer conveyed, but how it belongs to another era in other way. This is not only a matter of the specific references--as with those to the singer's having "been seen with Farrah," and "gone fast with a girl named Bo" (though in fairness, how many members of the target audience for the upcoming movie would know who he's talking about going just by that information, let alone appreciate the humor in Lee Majors singing about "Farrah" specifically, or get why supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, if they recognize that name, is in the list at all?). It is also because through all of them the song references an era that saw, beyond any one celebrity or group of celebrities and the minutiae of their careers, a media world which still had screen stars and sex symbols, and in which one could expect to acknowledge that men are dazzled by screen goddesses' exceptional, conventional, physical beauty and the sex appeal derived therefrom without condemnation or hypocrisy and not bring upon themselves a frenzy of pearl-clutching (or even real) outrage for having done so.
How very, very different is this third decade of the twenty-first century (as one piece I ran into about the song made clear as I did my bit of research for this post)--and how very different is the movie version of The Fall Guy likely to be from what we remember, likely not to the film's advantage as either a piece of entertainment, or a commercial endeavor.
How very, very different is this third decade of the twenty-first century (as one piece I ran into about the song made clear as I did my bit of research for this post)--and how very different is the movie version of The Fall Guy likely to be from what we remember, likely not to the film's advantage as either a piece of entertainment, or a commercial endeavor.
The January 2024 Box Office: How Did the First Month of the Year Go for Hollywood?
As noted here, 2023 went much less well for Hollywood than many thought it would at the start of the year--in large part due to the rejection of many tried-and-true-seeming franchises and even genres (the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero films, Disney animation, etc.).
Did the first month of 2024 provide any relief?
As it happened, in current dollars the gross was well down from that of January 2023 ($494 million versus $584 million), but one may argue for the prior year's January having been boosted by the behemoth that was Avatar 2--which took in so much in 2023 that it is actually #7 on the list of the year's highest-grossing in-calendar releases. Still, one can point out that it has been the norm for December to have really big movies still cleaning up in January, with the point underlined by what we find when we look at the average in the six year 2015-2020 (January 2020 included here because even if things changed just a little later that year that month at least went like a normal, pre-pandemic January), which had the grosses to show for it. Here are those grosses adjusted for December 2023 prices (change from which to January 2024 prices we can assume as negligible for the purposes of this calculation):
January Box Office Grosses, 2015-2020*
2020--$1.07 billion
2019--$993 million
2018--$1.19 billion
2017--$1.215 billion
2016--$1.346 billion
2015--$1.322 billion
In the above figures we can see a downward trend--but one can argue for 2015, 2016, 2017 having been really exceptional due to the surprise success of American Sniper and the particularly high grosses of the first two of the new Disney Star Wars films. Moreover, even January 2020 (which improved on January 2019 by almost 8 percent in real terms) was a more than billion dollar month in today's prices, with a gross at least twice as high as what January 2024 managed. The result is that one can see the January box office as down by not just 18 percent in comparison with 2023 (adjusting for inflation), but down by at least half from the pre-pandemic norm, with just 40 percent of the average January gross seen in 2015-2020 (circa $1.2 billion).
These are very discouraging numbers--underlining just how rough the year ahead could be for the battered movie industry.
* Current dollar data from the Box Office Mojo, adjusted using the Consumer Price Index.
Did the first month of 2024 provide any relief?
As it happened, in current dollars the gross was well down from that of January 2023 ($494 million versus $584 million), but one may argue for the prior year's January having been boosted by the behemoth that was Avatar 2--which took in so much in 2023 that it is actually #7 on the list of the year's highest-grossing in-calendar releases. Still, one can point out that it has been the norm for December to have really big movies still cleaning up in January, with the point underlined by what we find when we look at the average in the six year 2015-2020 (January 2020 included here because even if things changed just a little later that year that month at least went like a normal, pre-pandemic January), which had the grosses to show for it. Here are those grosses adjusted for December 2023 prices (change from which to January 2024 prices we can assume as negligible for the purposes of this calculation):
January Box Office Grosses, 2015-2020*
2020--$1.07 billion
2019--$993 million
2018--$1.19 billion
2017--$1.215 billion
2016--$1.346 billion
2015--$1.322 billion
In the above figures we can see a downward trend--but one can argue for 2015, 2016, 2017 having been really exceptional due to the surprise success of American Sniper and the particularly high grosses of the first two of the new Disney Star Wars films. Moreover, even January 2020 (which improved on January 2019 by almost 8 percent in real terms) was a more than billion dollar month in today's prices, with a gross at least twice as high as what January 2024 managed. The result is that one can see the January box office as down by not just 18 percent in comparison with 2023 (adjusting for inflation), but down by at least half from the pre-pandemic norm, with just 40 percent of the average January gross seen in 2015-2020 (circa $1.2 billion).
These are very discouraging numbers--underlining just how rough the year ahead could be for the battered movie industry.
* Current dollar data from the Box Office Mojo, adjusted using the Consumer Price Index.
The Decline of the Movie Star, Revisited
Way back in 2012 (which feels like both yesterday and an eon ago to me) I wrote a piece about what seemed the declining relevance of Oscar night. In the course of that piece I had something to say about what was already becoming a fashionable topic, the decline of the movie star.
All these years later it seems to me that the talk about the decline of the movie star was well-warranted, for exactly the reasons that many were raising then--the fragmentation of pop culture and the sharpening divisions among the audience, the ascent of franchises (and special effects) at the expense of actors, the social and cultural changes that have eliminated those niches that made actors into icons. Indeed, if anything all of this seems to me to have become a good deal more pronounced in those years, with this reinforced in particular by the changes in how we get our movies, reinforced by the pandemic. Less and less do we see them in the theater, which I think had its element of mystique--and more and more do we see them privately on smaller screens, and indeed via streaming services that have done as much as anything else to divide our attentions. Exemplary of this is how the funding of for-streaming content years ago got to the point at which really big movies with A-list cast and crew regularly get made and released ($150 million, $200 million, $300 million movies directed by the likes of Michael Bay and starring people like Ryan Reynolds), with many of us scarcely noticing they were there, let alone their "entering the zeitgeist."
Of course, the streaming services have been cutting back on their funding of "content" for a while now--indeed, in the case of WBD's Batgirl they have gone to extreme lengths to cut anticipated losses on what seem to them unpromising projects--but I do not see the landscape wholly reverting to its earlier condition, all as the decline of the theatrical experience seems likely to continue regardless as studios find their longtime formula for getting people to the theaters failing, and show every sign of incapacity of finding a new one. The result is that at this point I see just about no chance of the film star making a comeback as a pop cultural institution, however much some seem to yearn for its return.
All these years later it seems to me that the talk about the decline of the movie star was well-warranted, for exactly the reasons that many were raising then--the fragmentation of pop culture and the sharpening divisions among the audience, the ascent of franchises (and special effects) at the expense of actors, the social and cultural changes that have eliminated those niches that made actors into icons. Indeed, if anything all of this seems to me to have become a good deal more pronounced in those years, with this reinforced in particular by the changes in how we get our movies, reinforced by the pandemic. Less and less do we see them in the theater, which I think had its element of mystique--and more and more do we see them privately on smaller screens, and indeed via streaming services that have done as much as anything else to divide our attentions. Exemplary of this is how the funding of for-streaming content years ago got to the point at which really big movies with A-list cast and crew regularly get made and released ($150 million, $200 million, $300 million movies directed by the likes of Michael Bay and starring people like Ryan Reynolds), with many of us scarcely noticing they were there, let alone their "entering the zeitgeist."
Of course, the streaming services have been cutting back on their funding of "content" for a while now--indeed, in the case of WBD's Batgirl they have gone to extreme lengths to cut anticipated losses on what seem to them unpromising projects--but I do not see the landscape wholly reverting to its earlier condition, all as the decline of the theatrical experience seems likely to continue regardless as studios find their longtime formula for getting people to the theaters failing, and show every sign of incapacity of finding a new one. The result is that at this point I see just about no chance of the film star making a comeback as a pop cultural institution, however much some seem to yearn for its return.
How Did Aquaman 2 Play in China?
Back in 2018 a significant factor in the first Aquaman film's success was its exceptionally robust performance internationally, especially in China. Grossing just short of $292 million there, this made it the DCEU's sole billion-dollar success to date (and that when, five inflationary years earlier, a billion was worth quite a bit more than it is now).
Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.
This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)
The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.
* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.
Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.
This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)
The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.
* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.
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