Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbusters" Tournament, 2023 Edition: Eight Observations

Deadline has wrapped up its latest "Most Valuable Blockbuster" tournament--rounded off its lists of 2023's most profitable, and least profitable, films, certainly.

As sophisticated box office-watchers know, the tournaments are an imperfect source of data. Just consider how in the past the production budgets they reported proved understated in the wake of later revelations (the more significant in that some of these figures are lower than we were told they were before, as with the $100 million rather than $150 million figure for Spider-Man), the inconsistent use of information about the part subsidies played (we were told the net production cost of Captain Marvel 2 was $220 million after a significant subsidy, but this is not acknowledged here), the similarly inconsistent use of merchandising data, the ambiguities involved in the related-party transaction that is a studio selling the streaming rights to its own movies to its own platform, etc.. However, for lack of any comparably systematic round-up it seems well to go with this report's findings for now, on the basis of which one might remark the following:

1. There Were Four Superhero Films on the List, But . . .
We hear much talk these days of superhero fatigue--and much sneering about that talk. "Look at all the superhero films on this list!" some might say. However, one could equally well say, look at all the superhero films that did not make the list, among them two of the year's Marvel Cinematic Universe films (Ant-Man 3 and Captain Marvel 2), and four WBD/DC films (Shazam 2, Blue Beetle, The Flash, Aquaman 2), while two of these topped the list of the year's biggest money-losers (with Captain Marvel 2 heading the list, and The Flash right behind it in second place). One may also note that the one live-action superhero film placing among the top ten this year (a very low proportion by recent standards, especially when one considers the number of releases in this genre the year had), Guardians of the Galaxy 3, was down in ninth place (and the weakest performer in that series to date). Of the other three superhero films two--PAW Patrol and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--were Paramount productions that were low grossers (failing to make the list of the top 30 worldwide grossers of the year), but whose low costs, and the inclusion of merchandising revenue in their cases, enabled them to place among the top ten in a year of weak competition (more on all of which later). Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, which considerably bettered the gross of the well-received original, can more justly be regarded as cinematic hit--though it may be noted, though its performance is still a far cry from what the Spider-Man franchise accomplished at its strongest (exemplified by the near $2 billion take of Spider-Man: No Way Home back in late 2021). The result is that I would consider the fuller picture evidence for, rather than against, superhero fatigue.

2. There Were Four Animated Films, But . . .
Per usual animation was well-represented on the list of the biggest money-makers of the year. However, in line with what was stated above low budgets were key to their reported profitability (each and every one of the movies reported as having a production cost of $100 million or less), the more in as, gross-wise, only The Super Mario Bros. Movie really soared at the global box office. (Spider-Man was more respectable than sensational internationally, adding just $300 million in those markets to its North American gross--as compared with Super Mario's $800 million internationally.) And again, merchandising revenue was key to the profitability of two of the four (PAW Patrol and Turtles). As the low budgets, and the titles, imply, Disney was not represented here--Pixar's Elemental, if reportedly turning a profit in the end, still failing to make the cut here, while Wish ended up one of the year's biggest flops.

3. Most of the Films Were Surprise Overperformers Rather Than the Predicted Successes.
As the big superhero films and franchise films generally and the Disney productions underwhelmed, the way was cleared for other movies that would ordinarily not have ranked very highly--those lower-budget and less "conventional" blockbusters--to top the charts. According to my reading of the market at a minimum six of the movies fall into this category--namely The Super Mario Bros. Movie (few if any anticipated $1 billion+ for this one), the animated Spider-Man film (which so much bettered the performance of the original), Barbie (Boxoffice Pro's prediction for the domestic gross had been in the vicinity of $200 million for this one mere weeks before release), Oppenheimer (ditto), Taylor Swift's concert film (an extraordinary performer by concert movie standards), and Five Nights at Freddy's (again, going above and beyond as it approached $300 million globally).

4. The Profits Were Low, Individually and Collectively.
Together the ten films on the list of most valuable blockbusters made a bit under $2.5 billion in profit. This sounds like a lot. However, compare it to the figures for the 2015-2019 period before the pandemic, when the studios established their current pattern. During this period the profits for the top ten movies, when adjusted for 2023 prices, ranged from $3.3 billion in the lowest-earning year (2016) to $5.4 billion in the highest (2019), and averaged $4.2 billion (leaving 2023 about 40 percent down). Granted, later revelations suggest those profits were overstated--with reports of the third and fourth Avengers films having been much more expensive than originally indicated quite enough to skew the figures. However, the gap is quite large enough that it would take a lot of downward adjustment to narrow it much, while, again, the figures for 2023 are at least as suspect as in prior years, so again, it seems worth taking the figures at face value for now--the more in as the way in which those films became profitable differs across the period.

5. Those Profits Tended to Reflect Low Costs Rather Than Colossal Grosses.
While I raised the point earlier in relation to the animated films, the truth is that this pattern of low costs translating to surprising profitability--far better profitability than the megabudget movies had--carried over to the year's more successful releases broadly in this year when of the top 10 most profitable films four did not make the list of the top 10 grossers worldwide, three did not make the top 20, and two did not even make the top 30 (with Freddy's at #19, Taylor Swift at #23, PAW Patrol at #31, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at #34, despite which it was #4 on the "Most Valuable" list). If Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was a standard megabuck Marvel production (running the studio $250 million), the production cost of every other movie here was reportedly under $150 million--and in many cases much less (Barbie coming in just below that, Wonka lower still at $125 million, Oppenheimer, Spider-Man and Super Mario Bros. as "mere" $100 million productions, and the rest even less, with the Turtles movie made for $70 million, PAW Patrol $30 million, Freddy's $20 million, the Taylor Swift film a mere $15 million). The more striking given the galloping inflation of recent years, it is more striking still in comparison with the films on the flop list--the $200 million reported for The Flash and Wish, the $270 million for Captain Marvel 2, the $300 million for Indiana Jones 5 (by itself, exceeding the combined production costs of the five cheapest of the "most valuable blockbusters" list combined).

6. Thematically it Seems Notable That So Many Movies Were Based on Toys.
I can remember how not so long ago sneering at the video game-based movie as such was virtually universal. Going by the reviews of Super Mario Bros. and Five Nights at Freddy's films the critics' attitude toward such films remains less than kind. (critics grow insanely generous to other kinds of film those two movies got a mere 59 and 32 percent ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, respectively.) Still, in contrast with before the audience has made clear that it does not necessarily feel the same way as the professional critics--with those two movies, again, making the list of the top ten moneymakers of the year and Super Mario in the #1 spot. The movie that came right after it was Barbie--also a movie based on a popular toy. Meanwhile those two lower-cost animated hits, the PAW Patrol and the Turtles, also have a significant toy angle, rounding out the picture.

7. Disney No Longer Rules Hollywood.
Those who have been watching the box office for some time likely remember how back in the 2010s Disney seemed unstoppable. However, between how few hits it scored in 2023, and how many flops it suffered as those very expensive would-be hits proved the opposite, those days seem long past--with Disney's sole representation on the top profit-makers list Guardians at #9, and four of the five biggest money-losers (Captain Marvel 2, Indiana Jones 5, Wish, the remake-no-one-asked-for of Haunted Mansion), including the biggest loser of all (Captain Marvel 2), are Disney productions, with each of these reported as losing $100 million+ and the lot a combined $600 million+. Moreover, all this is without taking into account the at best lackluster performance of other major Disney productions--like Ant-Man 3 and the live-action adaptation The Little Mermaid.

8. The Cinematic Market Has Shrunken--and Fragmented.
Listening to the reports of Disney's troubles we hear much about the mismanagement of particular films, usually blaming anyone and everyone but the executives who actually have the power and responsibility in the situation (as in the whining about a lack of "adult supervision" on the projects, and the stupid and shabby scapegoating of the writers). However, the problem looks structural. Specifically Disney managed to dominate the market (mainly by committing vast sums to the crassest possible, lowest common denominator strategy), but that market appears to have since changed, particularly with respect to what moviegoers think is an "event" worth the trip to the theater Until recently it was obvious that a new Star Wars, Marvel or Pixar movie, for example, was usually regarded by a critical mass worthy of being called the "general audience" as such an event. However, this has become less clear, the bar for what constitutes an event for the audience raised, so that really wide-audience events are more elusive, and relative to mass audience hits we are seeing more movies become hits on the basis of intense appeal to a limited but very enthusiastic portion of the audience, and particularly a young portion of the audience. Thus did Freddy's, and those Paramount cartoons, become moneymakers--part of the audience really excited about them, the rest scarcely caring. Thus did it go with Taylor Swift's film. Even those really big hits, Super Mario and Barbie, seem to have had something of that flavor about them, just on a larger scale (the more in as Barbie was such a divisive, polarizing, film).

All in all, this year was anything but business as usual--and it does not seem implausible to imagine that it portends changes in the business.

Look for my thoughts about that in an upcoming post.

How Did The Fall Guy Do in the End?

This past weekend The Fall Guy hit theaters. It ended up making a bit under $28 million--under the bottom end of the range projected by Boxoffice Pro, and well under the $35 million that seems to have been conventionally projected for it.

That is to say it performed below even the very low expectations held for the film--with the result that the movie was not only outgrossed by 2005's Kingdom of Heaven, but by every first weekend of May release going back to the 1990s, back when the blockbuster season properly began only a little later. (Consider, for instance, how things stood in 1998, when the first real summer release was Deep Impact--which appeared the second weekend in May, and collected $41 million then, as that first weekend of May was left to a Spike Lee movie.*)

Of course, one can counter that the film's being given this release date was not quite what was never Plan A, that this would never have happened but for last year's strikes, that it is unfair to judge it by big summer movie standards. (Indeed, as Anthony D'Alessandro remarked, "it's a movie you find either in August, the second weekend of June or even the off season, which is where this was originally scheduled on March 1.") However, no one forced the studio to opt for that release date--they had plenty of other choices over the course of this so far very weak year, while one can add that the Ryan "Kenough" Gosling hype may have conduced to more optimism than was warranted. Moreover the money they sank into it (which has had some analysts scratching their heads) is not dump month money but summer month money, such that the studio hoped the prime stretch of year in which it launched it would give the studio a better chance of recouping a considerable investment than otherwise.

Alas, the movie will have to have a lot of staying power at the box office to do that--enjoy very good week-to-week holds again and again. Where this is concerned the fact that those bothering to show seem to like it (the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 87 percent, not rapturous but not bad), and the weakness of the competition in coming weeks, may make this a possibility. Still, it is an inauspicious opening for the movie--and for the summer season that was so thinned out as to make this one look like it "coulda been a contender," and as yet all too likely to end up looking like 2023 would have, minus its eleventh hour rescue by Barbie and Oppenheimer.

* Of course, that $41 million is, before inflation, about 50 percent more than The Fall Guy picked up, and adjusted for 2024 dollars $79 million, or almost three times as much.

Centrism and the Mainstream News Media's Complete Incapacity for Substantive Self-Criticism

A couple of years ago I took up the issue of "media bias", and identified six traits of the mainstream news media's modus operandi that seemed to me to be caused, or at least rationalized, by its centrist political tendency, namely:

1. A tendency to deluge audiences with disconnected and uncontextualized bits of information.

2. A tendency to treat experts, and especially "Establishment" experts, as authorities, and make a reliance on their judgments the alternative to coping with the disconnected bits of information.

3. A deference to--and promotion of--Establishment sources, experts and figures generally (and disregard of those who are not), translating to a deference to Establishment opinions (and disregard of other views).

4. The drawing of the boundaries of the acceptable spectrum of political opinion so that they extend much further to the right of center than they do to the left of center.

5. A tendency to "both sidesism" within the above parameters over striving for the truth about a contentious matter. 6. An emphasis on politics over policy.

One may debate whether the tendencies above really are problematic. Certainly from the standpoint of centrist ideology they are not wrong. That the news media gives audiences disconnected bits of information, or Establishment expert opinions, rather than endeavoring to explain the issues to them; that it is more prone to provide a platform to the right than the left, and to treat many a subject as a "both sides" matter; that it devotes so much attention to politics over policy; can, from the standpoint of a centrist deeply pessimistic about the public's capacity to understand complex issues; deferential to Established expertise and its judgments as the sole alternative to being overwhelmed by a confusing reality; viewing the right as legitimate but the left as not on the grounds that they are "ideologues"; and stressing the formation of consensus rather than truth-seeking, and on the political process rather than the ends they treat as generally and appropriately only small adjustments; as quite appropriate.

However, not all will agree with that judgment--that the media has a responsibility to attempt to explain the issues to the public, the more in as there is no understanding of democracy which does not require that the public be given the opportunity to educate itself and make informed decisions about the matters set before it--the more in as Authority has been an imperfect guide in the past, wrong again and again. (Just consider, for instance, how Authority said that a financial crisis like 2007 was impossible; and then when it did happen said "No one could have seen it coming"; and then after the impossible and unforeseeable happened said that the world got over it quickly, when in fact, as Adam Tooze realized, the crisis "broke the world," and we have been living with the aftermath ever since; Authority was wrong, disastrously wrong, at every turn.)

However, within the media respect for authority prevails, with the result that those who are authorities can never be held to account for being wrong, and command the same respect as ever they did as a result, while those who do not enjoy standing as authorities can never be given credit for being right when they were right, period, such that they can never win a way into the conversation. According to the same logic the media has not been wrong in covering these matters in the manner that it has, those among the public questioning it are instead the ones who are wrong from the centrist's standpoint--while the media's feeble shows of self-criticism when the undesirability of what it is doing appears undeniable only underscore this in such self-criticism generally ending in a declaration that someone else was really at fault. (Thus, as Hiram Lee noted, amid its breathless coverage of O.J. Simpson the talking heads "occasionally pose the question 'Why are we so interested in O.J. Simpson?'"--blaming the public for "forcing" them to attend to tabloid idiocies when the reality was the other way around.)

Given what in the view of anyone not blinded by its ideology are the news media's colossal failings it seems less implausible that those discontented with the quality of the news coverage available to them should look beyond the most mainstream sources--to which course of action the media, in line with all that brought everyone to this point, respond not by endeavoring to do better, but by screaming for the gatekeepers. Ironically, the mess that the Internet is means that the alternatives people are most likely to find are the ones that the mainstream media itself has promoted in ways from abundant mention of them in its coverage to mainstreaming their views and even their personalities, even as they put on a big show of criticizing them and all they do, the Establishment media never worrying about their massive role in the relentless manufacture of "fake news" in which we are all drowning.

The "Americanness" of the Superhero: A Few Thoughts

As any decent history of the superhero will tell you--not just the superhero in a broad sense going back to Gilgamesh but the comic book-based superhero tradition defined by Superman, the concept of the superhero has not been exclusively American, nor without its popularity outside the United States. (Indeed, just consider how much Marvel owes to the international markets, with these providing 69 percent of the nearly $3 billion gross of Avengers: Endgame.)

Still, it is common for observers to remark the idea of the superhero--the costumed, public persona-possessing comic book superhero--as having struck a particular chord in the United States, to somehow appeal more widely and deeply here than in many other places. I can think of at least two reasons for that, both suggested by my reading of Umberto Eco's essay "The Myth of Superman" (which I previously discussed here):

1. In the aforementioned essay Umberto Eco treated Superman as a myth--while noting that this myth differs from other myth in being a myth of the present-day rather than the past. The idea of a present-day myth seems to me to befit a country that, as the clichés have had it, has always been less preoccupied with the past than other countries, and more preoccupied with the present and future.

2. The attraction of the superhero is for many a sort of vicarious grandiose compensation for the mediocrity, inferiority, frustration that characterize the lot of most in this world, for many reasons. Of course, the desire for such compensation is universal, but again, in a society so atomized, individualistic, unequal, restless, insecure; so saturated with aspirationalism and thwarted aspirationalism and blame and self-blame of the thwarted for what they suffer; and offering so little else to hope for, ever fixing their eyes ever on individual "success," ever encouraging identification with such success and those who have it in that way that C. Wright Mills wrote about in White Collar; the desire, and the superhero as a way of gratifying it, seems likely to be the stronger. Indeed, if it is really the case that poor Americans see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," this is probably an easier sell--habituating people to the thought that they are exemplary in some way temporarily unrecognized by others, as if the real them is some more glamorous self behind the mundane surface and its unenviable treatment by others, or that the transformation of their situation is somehow always very close at hand, that they are ever just a radioactive spider bite away from greatness.*

* In light of inflation we should probably revise that to "temporarily embarrassed billionaires." I put the reader on notice that that is the form I will use from here on out.

A Closer Look at How Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Did in Deadline's 2023 Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament

Previously when speculating about the outcome of Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament this year I guessed that Oppenheimer would make the top five--and indeed it did, making exactly the #5 position.

How did the economics of that work out? Deadline reports that the production cost $100 million. But, as is the case when a movie does really well, participations and residuals were hefty--making the eventual outlay over five times that. At the same time the revenue from ticket sales was lower than one might have thought given the near billion-dollar gross, just $422 million (43 percent of the worldwide gross, where often it approaches 50 percent). This may have been a function of the high share of international sales (the movie did two-thirds of its business internationally, which has been known to skew the cut downwards), and the film's "legs" (the usual arrangement with leggy movies being the studio keeping less and less of the take in return for theaters running the movie longer). All the same, if the participations and residuals took a big bite out of revenue that might have been a bit lower than one might have guessed from the gross, it still worked out to an over $200 million net on the production, an extraordinary sum for a film such as this one.

Martin Caidin's Steve Austin, and TV's

In adapting Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was rather more faithful to the original material than I had guessed before picking up the first of those books. Steve Austin's accident as a test pilot of a prototype shuttle; his physical reconstruction with all its mental as well as physical agonies; his promptly being packed off on missions to South America and the Middle East--we see all this in the TV movies, with most of the modifications probably understandable given censorship, budgetary constraints and the like. However, some were clearly more deliberate choices, not least the reimagining of Austin himself. Caidin, who could be very much the edgelord, had a fondness for extremely unlikeable protagonists--and while Austin is no Doug Stavers-like supervillain, the runners of the show took it on themselves to considerably humanize him. Given that the intent was a weekly TV series people could enjoy as easy viewing it seems to me that it was a sound decision--one that has probably helped to give the show its extremely long life in reruns.

Remembering The Six Million Dollar Man

One of the ironies of there being a Fall Guy movie is that we had for so long heard about a movie based on Lee Major's other, more successful, TV series The Six Million Dollar Man being in the works--but as yet to no result.

That show was an adaptation of Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels--initially as a trio of made-for-TV movies, and then a weekly series that ran for 99 additional one-hour episodes over five seasons, while launching a successful spin-off in The Bionic Woman, both of which can be credited with lingering in pop cultural memory to a far greater degree than The Fall Guy did. (I remember how those reruns were a staple of what became the Syfy Channel back in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they still seem to get a fair amount of play on the classic TV-oriented broadcast and streaming channels, while The Bionic Woman got a short-lived remake on NBC starring Michelle Ryan in the lead back in '08.)

Of course, even if it was being talked about in Hollywood offices the idea only became increasingly implausible. The salability of classic TV show-based feature films has only declined since the '90s, for many reasons, while in this case even the title came to seem dated, not least due to inflation, above all in the medical realm. (The Social Security Part B premium was $6.30 back in 1973; it is $174.70 this year, a 28-fold surge over the last half century. And never mind that the New York Times will tell us "Don't worry. Be happy" regarding the skyrocketing of prices.) Given that no one is becoming a Steve Austin-type cyborg on the basis of six million dollars even the title of the show and its associated brand name recognition would have to be dispensed with--which is all that the kind of people who run the studios really care about in the end.

Martin Caidin's Cyborg as Proto-Techno-Thriller

Researching the military techno-thriller for my book on the subject a few years ago, specifically looking for the linkages between those old invasion stories of the pre-World War I era and the age of Tom Clancy, I found plenty of connecting threads--works across various genres that retained some of the old elements of the invasion story that, developed by later writers, led back to it. Thus by the early 1970s we were starting to get a good many books that look fairly close to the '80s-era thrillers of this type, with many of the elements, but arguably not quite all the way there, with a good example Martin Caidin's Cyborg--the novel on which Kenneth Johnson based The Six Million Dollar Man series.

Cyborg's military-espionage, technological and geopolitical themes, and its action-adventure-oriented and action-packed treatment of them, not least in its technically detailed flying sequences, are certainly consistent with the military techno-thriller's character. Still, there are reasons for thinking of the book as less techno-thriller than proto-techno-thriller. After all, if the flying scenes would do a later techno-thriller credit the real star of the show technologically is Austin's bionics, not a major theme of that form, not least because they are more than usually futuristic for the genre--science fiction-al, in a way that subsequent Steve Austin adventures were. Thus did the third book in the Cyborg series offer crypto-history involving "ancient astronauts," the fourth an artificially intelligent computer. such details Cyborg and its sequels look a lot more Clive Cussler than Tom Clancy, even if representative of the trend leading to the latter.

The First Weekend of Summer is Upon Us. How Will The Fall Guy Do?

These days Boxoffice Pro seems to be out of the long-range forecasting business, and so all we had to go on from the first week of April up until now in regard to The Fall Guy has been its initial prediction of a $20-$40 million opening weekend for the movie, without the usual updates. The weekend forecasts, if less comprehensive than before, still appear, however--and the estimate they published Wednesday has that movie pulling in $30-$40 million, suggesting that the outlook has become a little more bullish over the past month, with regard to the bottom end of the range if not the top. Still, the publication's staff are not unmindful of the film's disadvantages, noting here that even compared with projects like Charlie's Angels (which did not do so well in 2019), the original "The Fall Guy did not leave a substantial cultural footprint," that indeed "[a] vast majority of audiences under the age of 30 probably wouldn't remember who Lee Majors was," while those who were actually fans of the original "may be put off" by what they have done with the material (certainly I think they would not care for "Kenough" crying in his truck to Taylor Swift, among much, much else in just the few bits of the film we saw in that "Everything" trailer), such that this movie "may be one of those cases where the filmmakers wind up pleasing no one in trying to please everyone."

Of course, the critics loved it--but then claquing is their job. The audience gets its say now, and we will see if the film's strengths will outweigh its all too numerous and obvious disadvantages. But where the bigger picture is concerned one does well to remember that even the $40 million of the high end of this film's range will still work out to the weakest opening for the first big movie of the summer in nearly two decades, making for an inauspicious beginning to this hugely important season for the industry.

The North American Box Office During the First Third of 2024

During 2015-2019 the first third of the year--the January through April period--the North American box office averaged $4.4 billion in 2023 dollars. In 2023 the figure was a comparatively meager $2.6 billion--about 59 percent of that total.

By contrast the North American box office just barely broke $2 billion (taking in $2.04 billion by April 30, or more like $1.97 billion when we adjust for inflation)--a more than one-fifth drop from 2023 for the same four-month period, and an even larger, more than halfway, drop, from the 2015-2019 average. Putting this situation more fully into context one may say that it continues the pattern from the last third of 2023, which had similarly been depressed--or, rather, the pattern evident for the last year. (The twelve month May 2023-April 2024 period saw just $8.25 billion collected in 2023 dollars--as against $14 billion for the equivalent periods between May 2014 and April 2019, with even that including the bump from the extreme overperformances of Barbie and Oppenheimer.)

Thus do the hard times continue.

How Did April 2024 Go For the Box Office?

In 2015-2019 movie ticket sales in North America during the month of April averaged $1.1 billion in 2023 dollars. Admittedly the number was bumped up by summer beginning early in 2018-2019 with the release of the two parts of the big climax to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Three with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, but the average for 2015-2017 is still $1 billion without them. In 2023 April did fall a bit short of that, but not by much--the mega-hit that The Super Mario Bros. Movie was raising the total to $900 million in the same terms--90 percent of the 2015-2017 figure. (Had the rest of the year gone as well we would have spoken of a near-complete recovery of the box office to its pre-pandemic level, rather than a "new normal" for it such as I am discussing now, with North Americans going to the theater a couple of times a year instead of four times a year as before.)

As I remarked a few weeks ago, while after a depressed fall, and January-February period, March saw the box office finally improve on the prior year's performance (largely thanks to Dune, with a little help from Ghostbusters and Godzilla), I expected that April would bring with it a return to the earlier, depressed condition. And indeed, while Godzilla performed more or less in line with reasonable expectations for the film, Ghostbusters less well than some hoped though far from the total flop some might also have feared in light of how unimpressed people were with it, it was far from enough to carry the month the way the releases of prior years have. Ending up with a mere $427 million grossed (assuming the 3.2 percent inflation seen over the past year, $414 million in 2023 dollars), this makes for a take about 38 percent of the 2015-2019 average, and 43 percent of even the more modest 2015-2017 average. The result is that the year continues to see the box office take run far behind that of the equivalent period in 2023, never mind the pre-pandemic years--with, for the time being at least, May not seeming to offer much respite, certainly going by the numbers I have seen for The Fall Guy, the next Planet of the Apes film and the plausible prospects of the next Mad Max movies.

Revisiting the Prospects of Deadpool & Wolverine

Like a great many others in discussing the upcoming return of Deadpool I have written of the film as "Deadpool 3," not just because this was a lot more convenient than having to write Deadpool & Wolverine over and over again, but because the film actually seemed to me to actually be a Deadpool 3. However, the film's director Shawn Levy took issue with this, insisting that this is not merely Deadpool 3 but properly speaking, a Deadpool and Wolverine movie that should be referred to accordingly (as Deadpool & Wolverine). I took this for just the usual pretension of film publicity, but since then the studio has released a new trailer for the film--which, I think, really does justify the view of the film as not merely a Deadpool movie with Wolverine in it, but a genuine team-up of the two characters in a movie really about the both of them and the big adventure they have together (Deadpool and Wolverine's Excellent Adventure!).

Having raised the subject it seems an opportune moment to look back at my prediction for the film's box office gross from January. Back then I suggested an extreme range for the global gross of $150 million-$700 million, and $400-$450 million the territory in which the film would most likely finish its theatrical run. Given that the box office remains depressed compared to what it was in 2023, never mind the 2015-2019 period, and that this has been significantly connected with franchise fatigue extending in particular to superhero fatigue, I still think caution is in order--the more in as Deadpool and especially X-Men were both traveling a path of diminishing returns commercially. (Recall the reception X-Men: Dark Phoenix got?) Going by the more easily quantifiable factors my conclusion still seems to me to be sound.

However, there are also the less easily quantifiable factors that undeniably matter. First and foremost it seems to me that there is a real measure of affection out there for both these characters, and for Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in these roles, and plausibly for the idea of a team-up between the two--and that this may all be the stronger for the years that have passed since audiences last saw either of them. I will add that the expletive-filled trailer for the film promises to "deliver the goods" here with respect to both action and the Deadpool brand of humor, while the makers of the film seem to be making a real effort to appeal to casual viewers (assuring them that this is one Marvel movie for which people will "not have to do homework", a requirement that was probably a liability for movies like Dr. Strange 2 and Captain Marvel 2), while at the same time offering something to hardcore fans (like the fact that, as this trailer confirms, Wolverine will for the first time ever appear in the costume from the comics and cartoons). All significant points in the film's favor, that going by the Internet chatter seem to be mattering with the audience, the movie is also likely to benefit from the same thing that Top Gun 2 did back in 2022--weaker than usual competition. (It is symbolic that this summer actually opens with Ryan Gosling in an adaptation of The Fall Guy.) This seems all the more the case in that last year's Barbie and Oppenheimer showed how a late summer release can really clean up, especially if what came before did not get theatergoers too excited.

Taking this into account I feel more bullish about the film. Do I think that it will take the Marvel Cinematic Universe back to its Phase Three glory days? No, that is more than any one movie can do, especially at this stage of things, with the market sharply contracted from what it was in 2017-2019, and this particular movie some way off the main line of the franchise.* Do I think it will make a billion dollars the way the first Deadpool did (adjusted for inflation)? That seems to me a very tall order for the same reasons. But looking at the numbers I presented earlier I think that as things stand now I would be less surprised if the film went over the $450 million mark than if it undershot the $400 million mark; that, in fact, a gross approaching or even reaching $700 million is more plausible than I would have thought three months ago. Pretty respectable these days, even with the hefty reported budget it might just let the film turn a respectable nine figure profit, and in the process restore some of the luster to the Marvel brand, not taking us back to 2019 but giving them a chance to keep what is probably the best they can hope for, a franchise that may continue to be a reliable (if more modest) earner even after its peak has passed.

* In 2017-2019 North American ticket sales stood at 3.5 per capita. In 2023 they were more like 2.2 per capita, a 38 percent drop, and 2024 will be lucky to match it.

Just How Profitable Was Guardians of the Galaxy 3?

It's that time of year again--Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament!

At the time of this writing Deadline has provided only the films making the tenth and ninth spots on the list. The #10 position was taken by PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie--a feature film tie-in with the TV cartoon.

I admit that this one was not on my radar at all, and have nothing to say about it. By contrast I had expected the #9 movie, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, to place here--because if an underperformer in comparison with its predecessors and some of the more bullish expectations held out for the film in the months prior to its release in a year in which so many big-budget films flopped it still looked like a respectable earner, with my reading of the figures back in May making me think a $100 million take in even the more pessimistic scenario I had in mind.

The movie's making the list means that Deadline offers us the numbers about this one. According to these the final bill on Guardians of the Galaxy 3 came to $550 million--about 2.2 times the $250 million production budget, counting the $90 million absorbed by participations and residuals and the like. The movie's total revenue was $674 million, about 55 percent of that theatrical revenue (thanks to the film doing a bit better than the bottom end of the range I discussed, pulling in, instead of $700-$750 million, about $860 million globally). The result was a net profit of $124 million according to Deadline's calculation. Computed another way the profit equals 23 percent of the outlay.

How do these figures compare with the numbers on the prior two Guardians films?

For Guardians of the Galaxy 2 the figure Deadline computed was a net profit of $154 million (a bit under $200 million in today's terms) on total costs of $515 million--yielding a 30 percent return.

For the original Guardians of the Galaxy the figures were a profit of $204 million (some $270 million in today's terms) on an outlay of $520 million, working out to a 39 percent return.

The result is that the original film was, both in terms of the return on expenditure and absolute return, the most profitable, the second film less profitable than that, the third film least profitable of all--affirming a trend of diminishing returns on the franchise from the monetary standpoint that seems reflective of the diminishing returns on the bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of which it was a part. Of course, that said Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $100 million+ profit still makes it a very worthwhile investment--but with the direction in which this series has moved (a 40 percent drop in relative return, a more than half drop in absolute return), to say nothing of the broader trend with regard to the MCU, the superhero film and the high concept franchise film as we have long known it, should give any astute investor pause in regard to the idea of a Guardians of the Galaxy 4.

Of course, we are likely to be getting one anyway.

Disney Dethroned?

As I remarked in a prior post Deadline is now in the midst of its annual "Most Valuable Blockbuster" tournament. Starting from the bottom of the top ten they have already identified the tenth and ninth-ranking films--the latter of which is Guardians of the Galaxy, which they make clear is Disney's only film to make the list in 2023.

Just one film--and that a mere #9 ranker.

Compare that to how Disney fared in the glory years of the mid- and late 2010s. Disney had the #1 film in 2015 (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and four in the top ten. In 2016 it missed the #1 position, with its highest-ranking film Rogue One getting just the number three spot, but had five films in the top ten. And then it claimed the #1 position three years running, all while maintaining a disproportionate presence generally, with three films in 2017 and 2018 each (the top three in 2018's case), and then in the annus mirabilis of 2019, having an astonishing seven of the top ten, including, again, the top three (Avengers: Endgame, Frozen 2, The Lion King, Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4, Aladdin, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker).*

Of course, that things went this way is unlikely to be very surprising to anyone who has paid attention to the box office during the last year or so, given how even in a year of flops Disney's offerings were conspicuous disappointments--Indiana Jones 5 and Captain Marvel 2 most notoriously, but also The Little Mermaid remake, Ant-Man 3, Wish and Elemental (which may have managed to turn a profit, but still looked a weak performer by Pixar's long exceptional standard). Indeed, it was my guess that on the list of the biggest loss-makers that always accompanies Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers, Captain Marvel 2 and Indiana Jones 5 would occupy two of the top three spots--all as Disney would be represented elsewhere.

Still, it seems only fair to ask how this came about. Simply put, during the twenty-first century Disney pursued a particular strategy--"Buy up every top-line franchise and brand you can and exploit them ruthlessly." Doing this with Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar, as well as its own animated classics-heavy brand, it scored much more than its share of hits. (Again, seven of the top ten most profitable films of 2019 as reckoned at the time!) But the market has changed--so much so that the question now seems to be whether Disney, and for that matter everyone else in Hollywood, is capable of changing with it.

* One may, of course, quibble with the numbers in hindsight given that the procedures of the British film subsidy system keep indicating higher outlays than are usually reported in these lists (as was the case with Avengers 3 and 4), but Disney is unlikely to be the only studio playing games here, and it seems to me that even taking this into account this still broadly reflects how things stood at the time.

Taylor Swift and Five Nights at Freddy's Made Deadline's Top Ten Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023?

Previously thinking about the likely makeup of Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers of 2023 I suggested the Taylor Swift concert film and Five Nights at Freddy's would get some recognition--but on the list of smaller films that made relatively large profits, rather than the list of "most valuable blockbusters." However, we see Taylor Swift: The Era Tour ranked at #7, and Five Nights at Freddy's at #8 on that very list--a development very surprising given that, where overall gross is concerned, they did not rank all that highly in that year. Where the listed global grosses at Box Office Mojo are concerned Taylor Swift's film not only did not make the top ten, but failed even to make the top twenty, ending up at only #23--behind that notorious flop The Flash (#21), for example.* However, Swift's film was also relatively low-cost, a $15 million production (one-twentieth of what The Flash cost). The result was that when all was said and done the movie, between its $261 million in ticket sales, and subsequent and associated revenues, made a $172 million profit. Thus did it also go for Five Nights at Freddy's--that movie, between costing a little more money and making a little more money than The Eras Tour ending up just a little less profitable than Swift's film (pulling in $161 million according to the Deadline calculation).

Those who anticipated the films would do well seem to be saying "I told you so" --but this seems mainly because they were confident in those movies' prospects, in large part because of personal enthusiasm about them, and focusing on that would make us miss two very large, important developments here.

One is that these comparatively low-grossing movies outdid so many bigger-grossing movies profit-wise, with all that suggests about the declining viability of those movies that were for so long Hollywood's principal moneymakers (like The Flash, which made more money than the Taylor Swift film, but seems certain to produce a nine figure loss for WBD).

The other is that the bar for making the top ten list is a lot lower than it used to be. Back in 2019 Taylor Swift's film would not only not have ranked at #7 with a profit of $172 million, but would not have made the top ten at all. In 2019 the tenth-ranked film on Deadline's list was the Jumanji sequel, with $236 million, while the seventh-ranked film, the live-action adaptation of Aladdin, reportedly made a profit of $356 million, twice what Taylor Swift's film did, even before we consider the considerable inflation of these years (a more than 20 percent rise in prices since 2019).

Together the two factors are indicative of a situation of a shrunken film market--doing well in which may mean playing by very different rules from those that prevailed just a few years ago when Disney was the champion.

Will Xander Cage Come Back for One Last Adventure? (Thoughts on the Possibility of a XXX4)

The Xander Cage (or XXX) spy-fi franchise has had rather a rocky history. Very much of the '90s in its origins, bringing together as it did the American spy-fi boom and resurgence of the 007 franchise in that decade with the "extreme" craze, the idea behind it was to update the James Bond-style spy for "a new generation."

The resulting, first, XXX film did well, but not that well (a $142 million domestic gross, it qualified only for 15th place on the list of the year's top grossers), and the film's star Vin Diesel walked away, the sequel proceeded without him (indeed, Diesel's character Xander Cage was supposedly killed off), and flopped, after which plans for a third movie were, as I remarked in 2012, stuck in development hell.

What brought back the franchise back was the way that Vin Diesel's career resurged largely on the strength of the second wind that the Fast and Furious franchise got with its fourth film (from which point it went from strength to strength through the next several films), which was in good part a matter of how well the movies were doing in the Chinese market. The peak of the series, Furious 7, saw the movie take in a sensational $1.5 billion worldwide, twice as much as the preceding movie that had previously been the series' best performance, with more of that money actually coming from China than from North America, well as it did there. (The grosses in the two countries were $390 million and $353 million, respectively.)

The result was that that next XXX film finally happened--hitting theaters in North America in the dump month of January 2017, an expression of little confidence in the movie, but also the expectation that amid relatively weak competition it might clean up. It did not quite do that in Hollywood's home market, taking in a mere $45 million--but making almost six times that much internationally, adding a bit over $300 million to the total with over half that ($164 million) coming from just China.

Accordingly we heard about plans for a fourth film--because back then it still made some sense to back a relatively costly film on the expectation of a big gross in China. However, seven years later any such film is still just being talked about, and it is not hard to imagine why. The disruptions of the pandemic apart, and the way that the Fast and Furious films' decline cannot but suggest that Diesel having this kind of adventure is not the draw it was just a short time ago, franchise films generally are doing less well. Indeed, if we hear less about the decline of spy-fi than we do the decline of the superhero film that the commercial decline of that form is nonetheless real (you can see it in the gross of No Time to Die, of Mission: Impossible 7, of again those Fast and Furious films), while the XXX franchise was pretty marginal to begin with by its standard (Xander Cage never coming close to rivaling 007, Ethan Hunt or even, after he and his gang turned superspies, Dom Toretto), and the Chinese market that was so important to the last film's profitability has become far less open to Hollywood.

The result is that all those factors that made a fourth film in the series a plausible business decision have vanished. On that basis one might think that as a result the franchise will not manage to escape development hell again. However, Hollywood's determination to exploit every franchise far past the point of diminishing and even negative returns for lack of inclination to do anything else seems to only be growing more pathological. The result is that I cannot see the greenlighting of a new Xander Cage being a sound business decision on the part of the Suits--but then again, neither does a Twister 2 or a Gladiator 2 seem to be that, and both those movies are scheduled to come to a theater near you later this year.

Daniel Bessner and the "Bad Writing" on the Marvel Cinematic Universe's latest

A year ago the press subjected us to quite a bit of drivel about various studio blockbusters suffering because they did not have "good writers"--as if those running the studios backing $300 million productions said "You know what? Let's get the not-good writers for this impossible task of making this umpteenth sequel to a long stale franchise that nobody ever asked for palatable to the public."

It was as stupid as it was shabby, the more in as with a writer's strike on it looked the more obviously like the cheap worker-bashing by bosses it obviously was, but the various figures who made such remarks in the press would not stop offering such comment, even extending it to other artists (as with Robert Iger's all too characteristically foolish crack about "unsupervised directors").

Reading Daniel Bessner's extraordinary article in Harper's about the lot of the writer in neoliberal, post-Great Recession, post-COVID, post-strike Hollywood makes it all the clearer just how illegitimate such nonsense is, given that, again, the studios have robbed the writers of their scope to do their jobs, with Marvel at the absolute forefront of the process. (Thus has Marvel brought the TV-type "writer's room" into film-making, and at the same time, expected writers to write whole seasons of shows without letting them know what the ending is supposed to be because the executives want to hold on to the maximum latitude to generate crappy spin-offs--and then blamed the writers for the failings of the material.)

For those seriously interested in the subject, and interested in the reality of the situation rather than the claqueurs' praises, the piece seems to me essential reading.

Merchandising and the Bottom Line for Today's Movies: Estimating Profitability

It has long been the case that merchandising has been crucial to the revenue stream for Hollywood films for a long time--for so long that many seeing Spaceballs over the years must have been unclear on just why Mel Brooks so pointedly raised the issue in that film. (The reason is that Star Wars was the watershed here.)

In its calculations Deadline has income from merchandising accounting for over a fifth of the revenue for PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie (which made the #10 spot in its Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023 tournament). Indeed, the publication's analyst Anthony D'Alessandro notes that merchandising was decisive where profitability was concerned, and indeed the film "greenlit" here because of this.

This is a more common story than one might think--but it seems to me that taking merchandising into account here and not in the case of other films (it is not mentioned in the report on Guardians of the Galaxy 3, of the huge importance of merchandising to Marvel's profits) is distortive of the rankings this time around.

Might Profits for Movies Mean Losses for Streamers? (Or Vice-Versa?)

Reviewing the numbers Deadline offers on the most (and least) profitable movies of the year one sees a differentiation of the revenue streams for those films by type, with streaming indicated separately.

As it happens, streaming platforms are largely studio-owned--with Disney owning Disney Plus, for example. And so an important part of the revenue for Disney movies consists of Disney Plus buying the rights to stream a Disney-made movie. (As Anthony D'Alessandro explains in the item devoted to Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the $180 million Deadline reports for the revenue from streaming "includes the amount for which Disney sells the film to itself, Disney+ being the pay-one window for the studio's movies.")

In and of itself this should shock no one who has been paying attention. In the current world economy, where things like antitrust law are so often dead letters, "related-party" trade in its various forms makes up a very high proportion of the world's total trade. Indeed, of the U.S.' import-export trade in goods in ">2021 and 2022 over 40 percent was represented by related-party trade of this kind. Still, as Investopedia explains, while "there are rules and standards for related-party transactions," there are conflicts of interest, and particular difficulties for auditing the transactions, with "improperly inflated earnings, even fraud" something that can--does--happen.

Thus some see such numbers, and wonder. After all, no more are Hollywood studios than the rest of the corporate world known for their impeccable accounting, or for their forthrightness about financial reality--and it is all too easy for a studio to fatten the bottom line for a movie by selling it to its streaming service at an inflated price, or should the alternative prove more desirable at the time, sell the movie at a below-market price to help out the streaming service. And if it seems to me that the entertainment press does not much interest itself in such questions (like the rest of the press they are more likely to do PR for big companies than properly cover them), I have seen in comment threads and various other fora that the "armchair movie executive" at which that press sneers do see, and doubt, far from unreasonably.

The Erosion of Movie Ticket Sales Before the Pandemic

Writing in this blog in the past I have repeatedly discussed how after the collapse of theatergoing in the 1950s and 1960s North American theatergoing stabilized at about 4-5 per capita ticket sales a year.

I made that calculation over a decade ago, and it seemed to me that the situation did not change so dramatically as to compel redoing that calculation.

Reexamining the numbers for the 2010s I am no longer convinced of that. Certainly there has been nothing so dramatic as the collapse of filmgoing when Americans became TV-watchers. Still, consider these figures for 1995-2019 as split into five year periods.*

In 1995-1999 the average was 4.4 tickets per capita per year.

In 2000-2004 it was 4.6.

In 2005-2009 it was 4.2.

So far, so good. Of course, after 2009 the figure fell below 4, but that was in the wake of the shock of the Great Recession, after which the figure got back up to about 4 in 2012, so it looked like the old pattern held up to that point, 4-5 trips a year plausibly remaining the norm. Still, 2012 proved the anomaly just a few short years on. When we take the two five-year blocks after 2009 as wholes, we find that in 2010-2014 the figure was just 3.8 tickets per capita, and if one could think of the number as depressed by the Great Recession, in 2015-2019 the figure was 3.6. Of course, even this rounds up to four, so that one could say that North Americans saw four movies theatrically a year, but that is not the same as 4 to 5, while within the 2015-2019 block one could see the decline continue, the figure hitting 3.4 in 2019--a pre-pandemic low.

The shift from 4-5 in 1995-2009 to 3-4 in 2010-2019, a slippage of one trip a year, can seem a small thing relative to the drop in the '50s and '60s from thirty per capita movie tickets a year to just four. But proportionately it is still quite a bit, a decline of a fifth or a quarter from what it had been in the early 2000s to the late 2010s.

Of course, 3.6 per capita ticket sales, or even 3.4, is now quite a bit more than the business Hollywood is doing. In 2023, which plausibly looked like the "new normal" for the industry in light of moviegoers' habits and the abundance of major releases on offer, ticket sales were more like 2.2 per capita--2 to 2.5 rather than 3 to 4, another big drop, which may not represent the end of the fall. After all, 2 to 2.5 per capita ticket sales a year still indicates a good deal more moviegoing than we see in some other advanced industrialized countries (in Germany and Japan it is more like 1-2), suggesting that still less is far from implausible, while the factors that are driving moviegoing down continue, not least competition from other sources of entertainment (why not just stay home and watch streaming?), and of course, the reality that Hollywood's model for making hits seems to be in a state of collapse, with any shift to a successful new model at best in its earliest stages--and very possibly pure fantasy in the face of the financial, technological and cultural trend.

* For the 1995-2019 calculations I derived the figures on tickets sold from the web site The Numbers, the population figures for the countries encompassed in the North American film market from the World Bank's DataBank.

"Jobs for People Who Don't Need to be Paid"

Looking at recent reports about the working conditions faced by film and TV writers, actors, musicians and other artists one thing that has come up again and again is that the severity in the deterioration of conditions for all but the superstars has made it decreasingly possible for even those who have supposedly "made it" (landed a regular role on a hit show, signed with a major label) to live from their work. One consequence is that everyone must have another source of income--"you had your . . . day jobs or you had a trust fund" as Mad Men veteran Jason Grote put it. Especially as the demands, and costs, of trying to hold down a "day job" while making a career as an artist should not be trivialized (perhaps especially in these times, when wages' purchasing power have plummeted so), those who do not need to work for such an income have an advantage, even at this level, with the result that actual working people are finding less and less opportunity to pursue such a career. The result is that if the arts have always been dominated by the privileged, it may be that in our time this is becoming appreciably more rather than less the case.

Miserable as this is for all those who have artistic aspirations who committed the crime of not being born rich, it seems quite plausible that this has played its part in the extreme remoteness of the arts from the lives of the vast majority of the population in our time--to the impoverishment of both the arts, and society at large.

"Raising Eyebrows"

I have never cared much for the journalistic cliché that some remark or act has been "raising eyebrows"--their way of conveying that said remark or act has prompted mildly disapproving surprise. Apart from the ambiguity about whose eyebrows were raised, precisely, and why (weasel words time!), there is the fact that it is so often a poor descriptor. If at times muting the reaction to something quite serious, it is much more often a matter of insufferable priggishness at some trivial breach of "the proprieties," undeserving of the respect implicit in the journalistic coverage. It seems more fitting to speak of "dropping monocles" than "raising eyebrows" in such cases.

What's Happening with Boxoffice Pro?

For quite some time I have found Boxoffice Pro's comprehensive forecasts of upcoming and recently released films' grosses and their systematic updating of great interest, especially in these times in which so many movies surprise us amid what may be historic changes in the business of film--big franchise films crashing and burning (like The Flash), or unlikely-seeming movies becoming colossal hits (like Oppenheimer), as Hollywood confronts the possible end of the high concept-dominated post-New Hollywood era.

Alas, for some weeks now the forecasting section of the site has been much reduced, with just a handful of long-range (or even weekend) forecasts appearing this past month. (Thus The Fall Guy forecast I cited has not had a single update.)

I imagine that the impoverishment of the forecasting section is a temporary situation. (After all, Boxoffice Pro is a major film industry trade publication in circulation since 1920, before "movies" became "talkies.") Still, I have no idea when things will get back to normal that way--and can only look forward to when they do so.

Daniel Bessner's New Article in Harper's

Daniel Bessner's "The Life and Death of Hollywood" is exactly what journalism ought to be but all too rarely is--a deeply informed piece of reporting that goes beyond mentioning some facts or passing on some impressions to putting together a picture of its subject and explaining how things stand to the reader with, in this case, the analysis of Hollywood's development in recent decades, especially as seen from the standpoint of its writers, benefiting greatly from its combination of critical perspective, historical background and attentiveness to contemporary economic fact.* In this piece Bessner quite rightly explains Hollywood as undergoing its own piece of the broader neoliberal turn, affecting it in the same way that it has affected the rest of America's economy and society. Just as has happened elsewhere, the convergence of deregulation (in this case, particularly the collapse of antitrust enforcement under the Reagan administration, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 under Clinton), combined with creditist monetary policy to produce an extraordinary concentration of ownership, production and market power, and a triumph of speculation and short-termism, that has had catastrophic effects for the workers involved and society at large as the game became one of "winner take all." Thus did the early '00s see a half dozen vertically integrated giants (Disney, Time Warner and the other usual suspects) "raking in more than 85 percent of all film revenue and producing more than 80 percent of American prime-time television," while the ultra-loose monetary policy Ben Bernanke ushered in enabled further concentration as a mere three asset-management companies (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) to concentrate in their hands the ownership of, well, nearly everything ("becoming the largest shareholders of 88 percent of the S&P 500"), with the media giants no exception to the pattern. (As of the end of 2023 Vanguard "owned the largest stake in Disney, Netflix, Comcast, Apple, and Warner Bros. Discovery," while also having "substantial share[s] of Amazon and Paramount Global.") Indeed, even the talent agencies supposed to represent the writers to those companies similarly became an oligopoly of a few giants in turn owned by asset management firms.

In the wake of the reduction of film and TV production to an oligopoly owned by a few financial firms, and the inevitable ascent of a pseudo-efficiency-minded short-termist control freak mentality among studio executives, it was no accident that, in line with his cite of Shawna Kidman, the share of "franchise movies" in "studios' wide-release features" surged from 25 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2017--the age of "multistep deals" and "spec scripts" increasingly a thing of the past, exemplified by the crassness of Disney, and perhaps especially its Marvel operation, which "pioneered a production apparatus in which writers were often separated from the conception and creation of a movie’s overall story." (Thus did the writers have to generate a whole season of scripts for WandaVision without knowing how the season was supposed to end, because the "executives had not yet decided what other stories they might spin off from the show." Thus did Marvel bring the TV-style "writer's room" into filmmaking--if one calls the result filmmaking--as the TV networks replaced their writer's rooms with "mini-writer's rooms" offering those who work in them still less.) Amid the declining readiness to support the development of many ideas in the hope that one would pay off (thirty scripts to get one which might be made into a movie in the old days), amid the declining creative control and bargaining power of writers ever at a disadvantage in relation to the executives whose media courtiers celebrate them as "geniuses" (as with a Kevin Feige), amid the studios playing the old game of exploiting technological changes to contractually cut writers out of any share in the profits (in this case, streaming and its revenues, as Bessner shows through the case of Dickinson creator Alena Smith), writers lost in just about every way. Moreover, the post-pandemic economic shock has dealt them another blow as media companies that had, however exploitatively, been funding a lot of production retrenched, and all too predictably won the labor battle of 2023--at the end of which they may be said to have imposed an at best thinly veiled Carthaginian peace, with what is to come likely to be worse.

Given all that Bessner naturally declined to end his story on a note of false optimism, instead going from the "Life" to the "Death" part of his title. As he notes one could picture various palliatives helping, like government regulation of asset ownership (or indeed, mere application of antitrust law here), but all this seems unthinkable--precisely because what is happening here is so much of a piece with what is happening in all the rest of the economy, and it is all too clear how that is going. Indeed, one can picture things becoming even worse still in the fairly near term if the Hollywood executive class manages to realize its fantasies of using artificial intelligence to dispense with its workers entirely in even a small degree--or even in spite of the technology's inadequacies, simply tries and fails to do so, but destroys a lot of careers and "disrupts" the industry in all the wrong ways in the process.

* Reading Dr. Bessner's biography I found that he is not a reporter but a professor of International Studies--and cannot help wondering if that did not make all the difference for the quality of the item, especially where the avoidance of the hypocrisy of "objectivity" and the contempt for context that characterizes so much contemporary journalism are concerned.

Upton Sinclair on the Greeks

Discussing the literary legacy of the ancient Greeks in Mammonart Upton Sinclair asks just "how much do we really admire Greek literature and Greek art, and how much do we just pretend to admire it?" Recalling Samuel Johnson's quip about a dog walking on two legs, and how "it is not well done, but we are surprised that it is done at all," he suggested that the conventional exaltation of the Greeks is based not on a clear-headed judgment of the poetry and drama by modern standards, next to which these works are technically crude and representative of a world-view so unacceptable to modern people that as a matter of course we can seem "in denial" about it (far from Greek art being an art "of joy and freedom," their theme was invariably "the helplessness of the human spirit in the grip of fate," and at that, a fate which destroyed them), but rather a matter of "superstition" that has been "maintained by gentlemen who have acquired honorific university degrees, which represent to them a meal ticket," and the snobbery to which they cater (Classicism in itself become so "leisure class" by his time as to make "Homer . . . to the British world of culture what the top-hat is to the British sartorial"). Indeed, in Sinclair's view those who (like a Matthew Arnold or William Gladstone) "write volumes of rhapsody about Homer" testify less to Homer's superlativeness as a poet than his works' accordance with their prejudices--his "ha[ving] the aristocratic point of view, and giv[ing] the aristocratic mind what it craves," namely a vision of life in which aristocrats "unrestrained in their emotions and limitless in their desires" act out and are flattered in their self-importance by seeing the gods themselves take an interest in their personal tales, all as, one might add, they generally sing conservatives' militarist, patriotic, values.

This is not to say that Sinclair contemptuously dismissed it all (let alone was in any way a promoter of the kind of "cancel culture" that today seeks to "cancel" the Classics along with so much else). If Sinclair stresses the Greek pessimism he thinks too much overlooked, he is historically-minded enough to acknowledge, as others of like ideology have done, that to the ancient mind the world easily seemed "a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces which he did not understand," and out of this "made . . . a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but mournful despair"--and not confuse all this with the "dispensation of official pessimism" in more enlightened modern times (as with the apparent "'Classical' attitude" of "pathetic and heroic" "resignation to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth" of the aforementioned Arnold), which he saw as coming from quite other sources. Indeed, for all the limitations of that ancient mind Sinclair owns to pleasure in being able to see for ourselves "the beginnings of real thinking, of mature attitudes toward life" in in their early writings, and much else besides. If Sinclair finds much in Homer ridiculous and repellent, it seemed to him that one still did find "beautiful emotion"--albeit not the ones that moved lovers of the "heroism" of an Achilles, but "the mothers and fathers, the wives of children of those heroes [who] express for them an affection of which they are unworthy." He finds much to admire in the satire of Euripedes, "jeering at militarism and false patriotism, denouncing slavery and the subjection of women in the home, rebuking religious bigotry, undermining the noble and wealthy classes." Yet, if it seems to Sinclair appropriate to qualify one's criticisms, and that the works have their worthwhile aspects, that exaltation of the Classics in the familiar way as a matter of superstition and snobbery above all else stands.

Reading Sinclair it seems to me that there is an enormous amount of truth in this statement--which, indeed, ought to be evident to anyone who actually tries looking at those writings with clear eyes, as others have done, not all of them inclined to see things his way on most issues. (The critic John Crowe Ransom, who as one of the twelve writers of the Southern Agrarian Manifesto was far, far removed from Sinclair politically, seems to me to have grasped very well, and put even more poetically and succinctly, just how remote the Greek view of life, or at least the early Greek view, was from one of "joy and freedom.") Indeed, present a professor of literature today with the hard facts of just what is in "this stuff" and you are likely to get as their answer a sort of embarrassed agreement that reminds you just how much the Canon, and indeed what we say about the Canon, is the product of timid deference to received judgment, which one is expected to, in the words of Oscar Wilde, "endure . . . as the inevitable." And so the superstition and snobbery of which Sinclair wrote significantly prevail a century on--qualified, of course, by the decreasing extent to which anyone is paying attention to the Classics or to the humanities or to culture at all.

Alex Garland's Civil War: Some of the Critics' Views

Recently remarking Alex Garland's Civil War the movie theater trade publication Boxoffice Pro characterized the film's promotion as a "bait-and-switch marketing campaign that sold opening weekend audiences on the promise of an action movie" while "delivering a bleak drama that focuses a lot more on journalism instead."

It seems to me that many would regard this as not the only piece of bait-and-switch at work in the film, or even the most important one. As Forbes' Erik Kain remarked, the movie Civil War, in the publicity for which even the "action movie" aspect was arguably less important than the prospect of a drama about American political divisions (there are lots of action movies out there, not so many political dramas with a "high concept" draw like that one), ended up not really being about those divisions, Garland studiously "avoid[ing] the politics of the day in order to tell a more universal story." Kain's view of this approach was favorable, but others have been less impressed (finding in Garland's approach less universalism or "neutrality" than thoughtlessness and evasion and maybe worse in a piece of what one critic has described as a "gutless" cinematic "both sidesism").

However, whatever one makes of it, audiences would seem to have been pulled in by the offer of one thing, and given another. This weekend's gross will likely say something about the audience's ultimate reaction to that.

The New York Times, Right-Wing Publication

Recently reading the Columbia Journalism Review's analysis of pre-2022 midterm coverage of domestic affairs by the New York Times and Washington Post I was unsurprised (indeed, confirmed in my views) when they quantitatively demonstrated those papers' preference for politics to policy, and the rarity with which anything published in them actually attempted to explain the affairs of the day to the general public.

I was more surprised by the editorial contrast between the Times and its Washington-based counterpart. The Review article found that, if both papers were more prone to attend to the issues that Republicans care most about than those Democratic voters care most about, the Times was significantly more prone to do so than the Post. By the analysts count the Times favored the Republicans' concerns by a margin of over 5 to 1 (37 to 7 pieces, respectively), as against the 4 to 3 margin seen with the Post. It is an astonishing predominance, even in comparison with that other newspaper, that can seem to bespeak the political shift of the newspaper that publishes Ross Douthat, Bret Stephens, Christopher Caldwell (to say nothing of figures like Thomas Friedman).

Media Biases: A Quantitative Analysis from the Columbia Journalism Review

Some time ago I extended my analysis of political centrism to the mainstream news media and argued that much of its conduct--and in particular much of the conduct that many view as problematic--is explicable in terms of centrist ideology. This particularly included the matters of the media's preference for politics to policy, and its declining to attempt to explain complex issues to the public.

As it happens a November 2023 piece in the Columbia Journalism Review setting out the results of a quantitative examination of the pre-2022 midterm coverage of domestic affairs by the New York Times and Washington Post (from September 2022 to Election Day) was consistent with exactly that reading. The analysts found that, apart from their both emphasizing campaign "horse race and . . . palace intrigue," only a very small proportion of the items had any policy content to speak of, particularly of the explicatory type. Of 219 front page stories about domestic politics during this period in the Times, "just ten . . . explained domestic policy in any detail," while of 215 stories in the Post just four "discussed any form of policy"--working out to less than 5 percent in the former case, less than 2 percent in the latter case. Indeed, the Post did not have a single front-page story about "policies that candidates aimed to bring to the fore or legislation they intended to pursue" during that whole critical period, opting instead for speculative pieces about the candidates and "where voter bases were leaning."

Remember, these are the most respected mainstream publications--the "papers of record"--the kind of publications that many of those complaining about "fake news" tell us to attend to instead of the rest of what we are apt to see online. Considering that fact, one can only judge these publications to be themselves a considerable part of the problem with regard to the deficiencies of the public's understanding of current events--with, indeed, the preference for politics over policy and the extreme paucity of explanation just the tip of the iceberg.

What is a Superhero? An Attempt at a Definition

What is a superhero?

It does not seem unreasonable to define the term. Granted, a certain sort of person dismisses such attempts as bound to fail given that exceptions will always exist to any definition--but the existence of ambiguities does not, as such, keep definition from being a useful, in fact essential, tool for making sense of reality. (The map may not be the territory, but that does not make maps useless, no matter how much contrarians addicted to stupid epistemological nihilism natter on.)

A good starting point for such a definition is an examination of those criteria that may seem least dispensable to the conception of the superhero as we know them today--the superhero tradition as established in the comic book medium, especially from the advent of Superman forward.

1. They Must Be Both a Hero--and Super.
A superhero must obviously be a hero--a figure that does something both positive and extraordinary such as is worthy of admiration by others. Where the superhero's sort of heroism is concerned there is an expectation of service to the community of some physical kind, usually entailing courage in the face of physical danger, to save the lives of others because it is the right thing to do rather than a matter of self-interest; with such action a vocation rather than an exceptional incident. Of course, people pursue vocations that have them performing such acts--firefighters are the go-to example--but superheroes are distinguished from them in that they are super, their abilities exceeding the human norm in a way which is quantitative or qualitative or both. (Conventionally the firefighter running into a burning building must make do with "merely" human physical and mental capacities, but a superhero might be able to put out the fire with a blast of icy breath, as Superman can.)

2. They Have a Very Distinct and Very Public Persona, of which Distinct Powers, Codenames and Physical Appearances (Usually but Not Always a Function of Costuming) Tend to be a Part.
The above seems to me mostly self-explanatory. In contrast with, for example, heroes who are secret agents, who are likely to conceal their "heroic" aspect behind cover identities as they set about their work, the superhero's cover identity, their public persona, is itself heroic--and indeed advertised to the world at large, the more in as its elements include the aforementioned matters of a power, or powers, that tend to be very individualized; a similarly unique codename; and a unique appearance, usually but not always derived from a costume. (Barry Allen is a hero made a superhero by his application of "speedster" capabilities such as even other DC superheroes tend not to have to fighting evil; is, appropriately, known as the Flash, after his speed; and wears a red costume with lightning bolt insignia, also evoking that speed. Other figures such as Marvel's The Hulk and the Thing have distinct powers and codenames, and their distinct appearance--albeit less reliant on any costume in their case.)

3. The Superhero's Activity is Highly Individualistic.
As implied by the exceptional character of the hero's capacity, and their conspicuous public persona, the conception of the superhero is individualistic in action. Consider, for example, the firefighter and secret agent both. Both figures are conventionally employees of a public agency, which pays them money to do a job in line with orders--which does not make a sense of duty irrelevant by any means, but still raises the question of the paycheck, career, etc. in ways that unavoidably give their activity a different texture. Both also rely on their organizations for their ability to do their jobs--unlikely to have equipment or other supports necessary to their hero task if they were not so employed. By contrast the superhero is ordinarily alone, answering to no one--taking no orders, and often having a complex and fraught relationship with authority (epitomized by stories in which Batman falls afoul of the law), all as what equipment they need is their own (one reason why superheroes are so often independently wealthy, as Batman or Iron Man is).

Moreover, when we see superheroes "team up," teaming up is exactly what they do--these individuals cooperating in a joint effort rather than relinquishing their identities to be good "organization men" and women. (Iron Man is first and foremost Iron Man, and never "just" an Avenger.)

Of course, much else tends to go with this. The public persona is often a way of concealing a private identity, and at least attempting to protect a private life. And of course there is apt to be the unusual origin story--for superhuman abilities, and the decision to put on a costume and fight a private war against crime or some other such evil are the kinds of things for which most people expect an explanation, which is likely to be extraordinary because of what has to be explained. (Thus is Superman literally from another planet, while Batman has been motivated by childhood trauma and equipped by a lifetime of preparation for his vigilante mission, aided by vast wealth as well as extraordinary talent.) One may add that the superhero almost always faces a supervillain at some point--because any other sort of villain is a less than worthy adversary. (How long would Superman remain interesting just catching small-time purse-snatchers?) However, those three items seem to me to constitute the indispensable minimum--with any character not meeting those three criteria, which I think enable us to distinguish between superheroes and non-superheroes of various kinds, without bounding the category so narrowly as to deprive it of analytical usefulness, and permitting distillation as the following:

A superhero is a figure who, acting on their individual initiative and resources, and through a distinct public persona apt to entail codename and (usually costume-based) appearance, makes a vocation of defending the public from physical dangers such as accident, crime and "supervillainy," usually in a way requiring physical action and courage on their part, and drawing on abilities and/or equipment endowing them with more than ordinary human physical and/or mental capacities.