Deadpool & Wolverine followed up its record-breaking domestic debut (revised up to $211 million from the initially reported $205 million) with a second weekend take of $97 million that has raised its grand total to $396 million.
This works out to a 54 percent drop from the film's first weekend gross to its second. This is not small--but it is also a good deal better than was seen for many past Marvel films (many recent installments having drops in the 60-70 percent range, and typically at the high end of that range), and the more surprising not only in light of this being a "threequel" with a massive debut, but the highly gimmicky and cult-y nature of the material. Indeed, the Boxoffice Pro forecast for the movie had a 50-60 percent range for the likely drop, resulting in an $80-$100 million take, so the movie did about as well as could be expected.
The result is that the movie that looked as if it could be "super front-loaded" may have decent legs after all. Based on that 54 percent number--which on the basis of comparison with other films suggests to me that the movie may have taken in just 65-70 percent of its final North American gross--it is not only clear that the movie will blast past the half billion dollar mark in North America, but I suspect it will end up in the $550-$600 million range. As the film has been doing more than equally well overseas (the international gross is in the vicinity of $428 million at last report) it seems certain to break past the billion-dollar mark as well, though by how much remains to be seen. Right now we have a 52/48 international/domestic split in favor of the international market, which, if it were to hold through the movie's run, would (extrapolating from the "low" $550 million figure for North America) translate to a global finish in at least the $1.15 billion range. However, should the proportion end up matching that for Deadpool 2 (57/43 international/domestic), as the movie proves just that little bit leggier that would get it up to the $600 million North American finish, we could be looking at a global gross as high as $1.4 billion (so, more or less what I guessed back in June, it seems).
In either case we have a franchise best for the Deadpool and X-Men sagas. It would also be (Spider-Man apart) the MCU's highest-grossing film since before the pandemic, in real terms. The movie would also beat Joker's record for an R-rated film, if we leave inflation out of the matter, while should it reach the higher end of the $1.15-$1.4 billion range discussed here it will probably beat Joker in real, inflation-adjusted, terms as well.
No matter how you look at it, this one has been a winner commercially. However, I still stand by my earlier judgment that a Hollywood which has salivated after a hit like this one for quite some time is all too likely to draw the wrong lessons from it--seeing it not as a matter of a movie winning by giving audiences "something completely different" and especially by appealing deeply to a selected audience and pleasing them and not worrying about anyone else, but as a green light to just go on barraging audiences with superhero movies plain and simple, very likely to their cost.
Monday, August 5, 2024
The July 2024 Box Office--and What it Means for the Year So Far
The summer saw its share of tepid, or worse, franchise performers back in May and June--Planet of the Apes, Mad Max, Bad Boys. July added to the list with Despicable Me, A Quiet Place and Twisters (not Mad Max-caliber disasters, the numbers for the first two strictly speaking respectable, but still, disappointments compared to the business their predecessors did that make the trend of diminishing returns on investment in these franchises all too clear).
However, the press, true to its function as courtiers to the rich and powerful, have opted to instead emphasize the successes of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.
Of course, there is no denying the fact that Inside Out 2 went above and beyond at the box office, outgrossing the hugely successful first film by a rough third after inflation, domestically as well as globally, in the process of amassing its $1.5 billion in ticket sales. And Deadpool & Wolverine, if just opened, has taken in over $800 million in its first ten days in release. In the process the two movies added over $430 million to the North American box office for the month. Still, that total has not been spectacular. As of July 28 the North American box office July has seen $1.178 billion in ticket sales--which sounds like a lot until one remembers that in July 2023, even with all its underperformers and outright flops (Elemental and The Flash and Indiana Jones from the prior month, Mission: Impossible and Haunted Mansion that month), the box office did about $1.36 billion in business (and more like $1.4 billion in the June 2024 dollars that give us a much more useful picture), while the 2015-2019 norm was more like $1.6 billion when adjusted for inflation. The result is that in real terms the July 2024 box office probably did just 84 percent of the business it managed in the previous July--and 74 percent of the 2015-2019 norm.
The weak total is testimony to the fact that if Hollywood--indeed, Disney--managed to score two real mega-hits in the June-July patch, they are exceptions to a generally grim situation that has only gone so far in brightening the outlook for the season and the year. The above figures, after all, translate to the three summer months of May-June-July 2024 taking in just 83 percent of what the box office did in the same period a year earlier, and a mere 62 percent of the 2015-2019 norm. The result is that where in January-April the 2024 box office took in just 75 percent of the total for 2023, and 45 percent of the 2015-2019 norm, this improvement still leaves the take for the year at 84 percent of what the box office managed in 2023 by the same point, and 53 percent the 2015-2019 norm--which is to say, just over half.
In short, for all the exultation over a couple of successes these past months, Hollywood's longtime crisis goes on--and seems all too likely to go on doing so. Indeed, we may see some backsliding in the weak month of August given that, Deadpool likely having made almost half its money in those last six days of July, while the traditional "dump" month's releases do not look very promising (no one expecting Borderlands, or new installments of Alien or the Crow to sell out theaters, and indeed the three unlikely to make in their whole North American run what Deadpool did in its opening weekend, or even what it made just by Saturday night). Meanwhile the hoped-for hitmakers of the fall months--retreads of Joker, Gladiator, etc.--all look to me very risky indeed, and likely to test what Hollywood is so clearly hoping for, namely that the trend of franchise films of the kind they so love to sell the public losing rather than making money has run its course and they can press on with their familiar (lazy, crass, creatively bankrupt, intellectually stultifying, widely despised) business model rather than face up to the necessity of change at which last year hinted if they are to stay in business, the more in as the courtiers, like all examples of their kind, encourage the Caesars of the studios in the absolute worst of their behaviors.
However, the press, true to its function as courtiers to the rich and powerful, have opted to instead emphasize the successes of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine.
Of course, there is no denying the fact that Inside Out 2 went above and beyond at the box office, outgrossing the hugely successful first film by a rough third after inflation, domestically as well as globally, in the process of amassing its $1.5 billion in ticket sales. And Deadpool & Wolverine, if just opened, has taken in over $800 million in its first ten days in release. In the process the two movies added over $430 million to the North American box office for the month. Still, that total has not been spectacular. As of July 28 the North American box office July has seen $1.178 billion in ticket sales--which sounds like a lot until one remembers that in July 2023, even with all its underperformers and outright flops (Elemental and The Flash and Indiana Jones from the prior month, Mission: Impossible and Haunted Mansion that month), the box office did about $1.36 billion in business (and more like $1.4 billion in the June 2024 dollars that give us a much more useful picture), while the 2015-2019 norm was more like $1.6 billion when adjusted for inflation. The result is that in real terms the July 2024 box office probably did just 84 percent of the business it managed in the previous July--and 74 percent of the 2015-2019 norm.
The weak total is testimony to the fact that if Hollywood--indeed, Disney--managed to score two real mega-hits in the June-July patch, they are exceptions to a generally grim situation that has only gone so far in brightening the outlook for the season and the year. The above figures, after all, translate to the three summer months of May-June-July 2024 taking in just 83 percent of what the box office did in the same period a year earlier, and a mere 62 percent of the 2015-2019 norm. The result is that where in January-April the 2024 box office took in just 75 percent of the total for 2023, and 45 percent of the 2015-2019 norm, this improvement still leaves the take for the year at 84 percent of what the box office managed in 2023 by the same point, and 53 percent the 2015-2019 norm--which is to say, just over half.
In short, for all the exultation over a couple of successes these past months, Hollywood's longtime crisis goes on--and seems all too likely to go on doing so. Indeed, we may see some backsliding in the weak month of August given that, Deadpool likely having made almost half its money in those last six days of July, while the traditional "dump" month's releases do not look very promising (no one expecting Borderlands, or new installments of Alien or the Crow to sell out theaters, and indeed the three unlikely to make in their whole North American run what Deadpool did in its opening weekend, or even what it made just by Saturday night). Meanwhile the hoped-for hitmakers of the fall months--retreads of Joker, Gladiator, etc.--all look to me very risky indeed, and likely to test what Hollywood is so clearly hoping for, namely that the trend of franchise films of the kind they so love to sell the public losing rather than making money has run its course and they can press on with their familiar (lazy, crass, creatively bankrupt, intellectually stultifying, widely despised) business model rather than face up to the necessity of change at which last year hinted if they are to stay in business, the more in as the courtiers, like all examples of their kind, encourage the Caesars of the studios in the absolute worst of their behaviors.
Review: The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools, by Upton Sinclair
As Upton Sinclair tells us in 1923's The Goose-Step it was his intention to write just one book on education in America. However, the project grew and grew until he had far more material than he thought appropriate for one book. Accordingly he opted to produce two, the first of which was the aforementioned The Goose-Step--the two hundred thousand words of which Sinclair devoted to, as Thorstein Veblen had put it a few years earlier, "the Higher Learning in America"--while the equally voluminous follow-up he published the following year (1924) discussed the education America's students got before college in what we would today term "K-12" (hence, The Goose-Step being followed by The Goslings).
Coming to The Goslings after his first book I found Sinclair telling much the same story, not least the reality of control of the educational system by business (in part directly, in part through institutions they own like the so-called fourth estate, and in part with the help of conservative allies from the Catholic Church to the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan)--with the same results at the education system's lower levels as at its higher ones. Thus the teachers of the "goslings," at least as much as their counterparts in the professoriat, are subject to an exploitative and tyrannical treatment that, for all the pretenses, illusions and expectations that teaching is a "white collar," "middle class" and "professional" occupation ever encouraged by the pious praises conventionally bestowed upon those from whom "convenient social virtue" is demanded, so that they enjoy neither "the status of a free citizen, nor of a professional expert," but a mere hired hand who has their personal life surveilled, scrutinized, and when it is not to the liking of their employer, punished, in a way not only unknown for the free citizen or the professional expert, but most hired hands. Just as much as in the colleges what passes for education is a combination of intellectual stultification and political indoctrination ("patriotic," pro-capitalist, anti-leftist, etc.), with the relentless censorship exercised in such subjects as history and economics, the priority accorded athletics, the inculcation of "school spirit," playing their part in all this. And just as much as at the level of the colleges there is a combination of penuriousness and graft, as the businesses both fight to pay as little tax as possible, and then pillage the schools of what money they do get. From the ways in which the siting of school construction is decided in connection with real estate interests, to the way in which business is permitted to exploit the mineral and other resources on lands allotted the schools for their support in return for next to nothing, to the ceaseless rip-off in the putting up of the buildings and the provision of supplies from furniture to textbooks (the latter, a national-level racket dominated by a single firm, the American Book Company at its peak having ninety percent of the market), said businesses relentlessly cheated the taxpayer and shortchanged the children.
The similarity with the story Sinclair tells of the country's colleges is all the more apparent in that Sinclair tells it in much the same way, with the first half of the book largely given over to a tour of the relevant institutions across the country, the reports from which establish patterns he analyzes in the more "big picture"-oriented second half of the book. Still, the image Sinclair presents of conditions in the elementary, junior/middle and high schools has its own distasteful features, reflecting their different problems. After all, this was a period in which relatively few went to college, and especially relatively few of the less privileged groups. The result is that at the K-12 levels America's schools educated a far larger part of the country's population, and a population much more diverse in every conceivable way, while in spite of the measure of "standardization" imparted by the multiple levels of the machine (local schools under county and state administration) and national-level governmental and private organizations (like the National Education Association), did it in a much more diverse range of institutions, from the "little red schoolhouses" of the country's rural regions, to private finishing schools for young ladies from wealthy homes--with all the problems collectively entailed in their operation, and their relation to society at large. (Not the least of these was that the expenditure of what government money the schools do get is distributed in extremely disproportionate fashion, with public schools attended by the children of the well-off apt to be very different from the "dark, unsanitary fire-traps" run on two half-day shifts for the children of the poor in the very same school district, in a way that simply had no parallel at the college level.) The faculty teaching in those schools were also very different, in part because the barriers to entry were far lower, with one reflection the handing of faculty positions out as the spoils of local machine politics. (Horrid as their policies were, Sinclair never wrote of the colleges he discussed making anyone a professor just because they were a ward heeler's brother!) Meanwhile, in contrast with college teaching, teaching in K-12 was "feminized" ("a world which is five per cent male and ninety-five per cent female"), with all the inequities this tended to entail (from a refusal of employers to grant equal pay to equal work, to the harassment and worse to which the female teachers were so often subject by male administrators, perhaps the more in as so many of them were there just for what they could get). Certainly if the country had its religious colleges the opposition of some religious interests to the provision of secular education had no part in The Goose-Step at all comparable to what Sinclair describes here--with the same going for conduct of those employers outraged that children were being sent to school rather than toiling in their fields, mines and factories, and that when they grew up their educations might extend beyond the little they needed to know to perform the menial tasks they required them to perform on the job. And even where the problems were fundamentally the same they tended to have a sharper edge here--as with the "Won't somebody please think of the children!" sanctimoniousness and hysterics of what Sinclair called the "Babbitts" intent on persecuting instructors over anything they regarded as slightly amiss in their private lives, or politically unorthodox in their teaching. (While John Scopes had not been arrested for teaching his students about evolution when Sinclair published his book the fact that he was shortly after is rather telling of the situation that prevailed.) Indeed, on the whole the world of K-12 education as Sinclair presents it can seem even meaner and shabbier than that of higher learning in The Goose-Step--to which earlier book Sinclair in fact returns in this book's last chapters, discussing the response that earlier book received (frank interest from a good many of the sympathetic or at least open-minded, sneering sanctimoniousness from "kept" reviewers ever eager to bash him, disdain from the college administrators he called out for their conduct, the more in as they could not deny what he showed them to have done).
In conveying this picture--a more complicated picture than Sinclair's preceding book presented--Sinclair is well-served by his all too rare combination of gifts as journalist, social thinker, activist and novelist, not least extensiveness and thoroughness as a researcher, a sociological imagination and social vision, a body of relevant personal experience, an eye for telling details and anecdotes, and a lively writing style on fine display in the short, punchy, chapters he favors here as in his other Dead Hand books. Aside from making a good deal more readable a book that can at times seem as if it will bury its audience in minute details that risk monotony given the comparative constancy of the corruption and other failures he describes from coast to coast (that corruption, at least, one thing all those national institutions helped standardize), they enable him to produce from them an image which is comprehensive, yet not lacking for nuance--his treatment of such subtle and delicate matters as many teachers' conflicted attitude and muddled thinking regarding their status within society again and again ringing true (and in a way that shows Sinclair to be sympathetic and respectful, but also not in the least blinkered about human weakness by simple-minded idealism here).
Quite naturally The Goslings rounds out what Sinclair had to say in The Goose-Step. Of course, just as is the case with Sinclair's other Dead Hand books a hundred years have passed since he published The Goslings. (Indeed, 2024 is the hundred-year anniversary of the book's initial publication.) Still, contrary to the hopes Sinclair expressed at the time, society simply did not change in the way he thought it would--such change, much more than the narrower reforms he explicitly recommended (effective labor organization for teachers enabling them to fight for their rights, and the rights of their students, etc.), the real solution to the problem he described, with the reforms merely steps toward that which Sinclair himself wrote would be far more feasible if the responsible persons thought in terms of that larger social picture. (Certainly it seemed to Sinclair that teachers' coming around to thinking of themselves as working people, and being in solidarity with other working people, was essential to that unionization he described doing much good.) And American society in its essentials remaining what it was in Sinclair's day, so do its schools remain. Thus do the battles over education Sinclair described--the demand for honest administration of government monies and what people all too often get instead, the clashes between the champions of the public and of the private sector, the treatment of schools as battlegrounds by culture warriors, the struggle of teachers for recognition of their rights as citizens and claims as professional experts and those denying them, among much, much else--remain the battles filling up the headlines in our own day. In fact, what I have said of Sinclair's other books, and particularly the best of them, seems worth saying again here--that reading Sinclair's now century-old book we are likely to learn far more about the problems of our own time than they are likely to reading a good many more recent works (the more in as so few of them are likely to be written from a viewpoint at all like Sinclair's own, never mind presenting it so forthrightly). The result is that I would deem Upton Sinclair's The Goslings essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the problems of the American education system past or present, just like his earlier The Goose-Step, with it in fact seeming to me well worth reading the two books together as two volumes of a single study.
Coming to The Goslings after his first book I found Sinclair telling much the same story, not least the reality of control of the educational system by business (in part directly, in part through institutions they own like the so-called fourth estate, and in part with the help of conservative allies from the Catholic Church to the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan)--with the same results at the education system's lower levels as at its higher ones. Thus the teachers of the "goslings," at least as much as their counterparts in the professoriat, are subject to an exploitative and tyrannical treatment that, for all the pretenses, illusions and expectations that teaching is a "white collar," "middle class" and "professional" occupation ever encouraged by the pious praises conventionally bestowed upon those from whom "convenient social virtue" is demanded, so that they enjoy neither "the status of a free citizen, nor of a professional expert," but a mere hired hand who has their personal life surveilled, scrutinized, and when it is not to the liking of their employer, punished, in a way not only unknown for the free citizen or the professional expert, but most hired hands. Just as much as in the colleges what passes for education is a combination of intellectual stultification and political indoctrination ("patriotic," pro-capitalist, anti-leftist, etc.), with the relentless censorship exercised in such subjects as history and economics, the priority accorded athletics, the inculcation of "school spirit," playing their part in all this. And just as much as at the level of the colleges there is a combination of penuriousness and graft, as the businesses both fight to pay as little tax as possible, and then pillage the schools of what money they do get. From the ways in which the siting of school construction is decided in connection with real estate interests, to the way in which business is permitted to exploit the mineral and other resources on lands allotted the schools for their support in return for next to nothing, to the ceaseless rip-off in the putting up of the buildings and the provision of supplies from furniture to textbooks (the latter, a national-level racket dominated by a single firm, the American Book Company at its peak having ninety percent of the market), said businesses relentlessly cheated the taxpayer and shortchanged the children.
The similarity with the story Sinclair tells of the country's colleges is all the more apparent in that Sinclair tells it in much the same way, with the first half of the book largely given over to a tour of the relevant institutions across the country, the reports from which establish patterns he analyzes in the more "big picture"-oriented second half of the book. Still, the image Sinclair presents of conditions in the elementary, junior/middle and high schools has its own distasteful features, reflecting their different problems. After all, this was a period in which relatively few went to college, and especially relatively few of the less privileged groups. The result is that at the K-12 levels America's schools educated a far larger part of the country's population, and a population much more diverse in every conceivable way, while in spite of the measure of "standardization" imparted by the multiple levels of the machine (local schools under county and state administration) and national-level governmental and private organizations (like the National Education Association), did it in a much more diverse range of institutions, from the "little red schoolhouses" of the country's rural regions, to private finishing schools for young ladies from wealthy homes--with all the problems collectively entailed in their operation, and their relation to society at large. (Not the least of these was that the expenditure of what government money the schools do get is distributed in extremely disproportionate fashion, with public schools attended by the children of the well-off apt to be very different from the "dark, unsanitary fire-traps" run on two half-day shifts for the children of the poor in the very same school district, in a way that simply had no parallel at the college level.) The faculty teaching in those schools were also very different, in part because the barriers to entry were far lower, with one reflection the handing of faculty positions out as the spoils of local machine politics. (Horrid as their policies were, Sinclair never wrote of the colleges he discussed making anyone a professor just because they were a ward heeler's brother!) Meanwhile, in contrast with college teaching, teaching in K-12 was "feminized" ("a world which is five per cent male and ninety-five per cent female"), with all the inequities this tended to entail (from a refusal of employers to grant equal pay to equal work, to the harassment and worse to which the female teachers were so often subject by male administrators, perhaps the more in as so many of them were there just for what they could get). Certainly if the country had its religious colleges the opposition of some religious interests to the provision of secular education had no part in The Goose-Step at all comparable to what Sinclair describes here--with the same going for conduct of those employers outraged that children were being sent to school rather than toiling in their fields, mines and factories, and that when they grew up their educations might extend beyond the little they needed to know to perform the menial tasks they required them to perform on the job. And even where the problems were fundamentally the same they tended to have a sharper edge here--as with the "Won't somebody please think of the children!" sanctimoniousness and hysterics of what Sinclair called the "Babbitts" intent on persecuting instructors over anything they regarded as slightly amiss in their private lives, or politically unorthodox in their teaching. (While John Scopes had not been arrested for teaching his students about evolution when Sinclair published his book the fact that he was shortly after is rather telling of the situation that prevailed.) Indeed, on the whole the world of K-12 education as Sinclair presents it can seem even meaner and shabbier than that of higher learning in The Goose-Step--to which earlier book Sinclair in fact returns in this book's last chapters, discussing the response that earlier book received (frank interest from a good many of the sympathetic or at least open-minded, sneering sanctimoniousness from "kept" reviewers ever eager to bash him, disdain from the college administrators he called out for their conduct, the more in as they could not deny what he showed them to have done).
In conveying this picture--a more complicated picture than Sinclair's preceding book presented--Sinclair is well-served by his all too rare combination of gifts as journalist, social thinker, activist and novelist, not least extensiveness and thoroughness as a researcher, a sociological imagination and social vision, a body of relevant personal experience, an eye for telling details and anecdotes, and a lively writing style on fine display in the short, punchy, chapters he favors here as in his other Dead Hand books. Aside from making a good deal more readable a book that can at times seem as if it will bury its audience in minute details that risk monotony given the comparative constancy of the corruption and other failures he describes from coast to coast (that corruption, at least, one thing all those national institutions helped standardize), they enable him to produce from them an image which is comprehensive, yet not lacking for nuance--his treatment of such subtle and delicate matters as many teachers' conflicted attitude and muddled thinking regarding their status within society again and again ringing true (and in a way that shows Sinclair to be sympathetic and respectful, but also not in the least blinkered about human weakness by simple-minded idealism here).
Quite naturally The Goslings rounds out what Sinclair had to say in The Goose-Step. Of course, just as is the case with Sinclair's other Dead Hand books a hundred years have passed since he published The Goslings. (Indeed, 2024 is the hundred-year anniversary of the book's initial publication.) Still, contrary to the hopes Sinclair expressed at the time, society simply did not change in the way he thought it would--such change, much more than the narrower reforms he explicitly recommended (effective labor organization for teachers enabling them to fight for their rights, and the rights of their students, etc.), the real solution to the problem he described, with the reforms merely steps toward that which Sinclair himself wrote would be far more feasible if the responsible persons thought in terms of that larger social picture. (Certainly it seemed to Sinclair that teachers' coming around to thinking of themselves as working people, and being in solidarity with other working people, was essential to that unionization he described doing much good.) And American society in its essentials remaining what it was in Sinclair's day, so do its schools remain. Thus do the battles over education Sinclair described--the demand for honest administration of government monies and what people all too often get instead, the clashes between the champions of the public and of the private sector, the treatment of schools as battlegrounds by culture warriors, the struggle of teachers for recognition of their rights as citizens and claims as professional experts and those denying them, among much, much else--remain the battles filling up the headlines in our own day. In fact, what I have said of Sinclair's other books, and particularly the best of them, seems worth saying again here--that reading Sinclair's now century-old book we are likely to learn far more about the problems of our own time than they are likely to reading a good many more recent works (the more in as so few of them are likely to be written from a viewpoint at all like Sinclair's own, never mind presenting it so forthrightly). The result is that I would deem Upton Sinclair's The Goslings essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the problems of the American education system past or present, just like his earlier The Goose-Step, with it in fact seeming to me well worth reading the two books together as two volumes of a single study.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
