After All These Years the Entertainment Press Still Doesn't Get It

Considering the profound changes in the film market since the pandemic, and the press coverage for them, I sometimes wonder if I am not overly harsh in judging the entertainment press as oblivious to said changes and what they mean for at least the commercial side of moviemaking. Then I run into a piece like Jesse Hassenger's "Fallen Stars: Why Are Hollywood A-Listers Flopping at the Box Office?" which absolutely confirms for me that the extreme lack of insight I attribute to their writing is indeed evident in that very writing.

Perhaps the most obvious piece of silliness in this particular item is the writer's expressing surprise, or at least telling us that we should be surprised, that this season non-franchise movies starring "A-listers" have consistently failed to "open," with this silly because what they tell us is surprising is not really surprising at all--for have we not been talking about "the death of the movie star" for eons now? Prompted again and again by some round of disappointments of the kind that were always there, but which have become the norm in the twenty-first century so that we heard this again and again? "Despite Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp The Tourist didn't make as much money as we thought it would. Guess star vehicles don't go over the way they used to." "The combo of Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt didn't make Passengers another Titanic. Guess it's time to rethink the draw of Big Names." Except that they didn't rethink anything, such that they have gone over it all again and again down to this less than sensational fall box office--just as they have also chewed over, in nearly the same degree, the decline of the mid-budget film, and of many a genre, from the "adult" drama to the big-screen comedy, high concept, romantic, or otherwise.

As one might imagine from this they are even more oblivious to the bigger picture and how it has evolved over that century they have so far missed. After all, any idiot should be able to look at the numbers easily available on a site like Box Office Mojo and do the very simple calculations (middle school stuff) that show the North American theatrical market for movies, already eroding in the wake of the Great Recession, after the pandemic stabilized at a level that in real, inflation-adjusted terms was 30-40 percent below what it had been before. Many factors have plausibly been at work in this temporary but sharp acceleration of the earlier trend, among them changes in habits as people stopped going to the movies for an extended period, dislocations in the theater market that left some areas less well-covered (with many people losing a favored theater, and finding too that a trip to the theater is longer or otherwise less convenient and more inhibiting), and how with the economic shocks of the last few years aggravating the long decline of the "middle class" have people are finding a night out at the movies a bigger indulgence than it used to be just as they are finding meals out and concerts a bigger indulgence than they used to be, etc.. However, the fundamental thing is that this is a structural shift which means that where people in North America on average went to the movies three to four times a year before the pandemic now one is very hard-pressed to get them to go more than twice (with the situation broadly paralleled abroad), and thus the studios competing for a pot of money about a third smaller than it was before.

Anyone who can figure that out should be able to imagine that this massive quantitative change in the market may also have qualitative implications for the market, not least with regard to how much money particular kinds of movies can be expected to make, especially in the Age of Streaming that has so many households spending the equivalent of dozens or scores of movie tickets a year on a service that didn't even exist two decades ago, leaving theaters offering very little that streaming doesn't (all as anything in the theaters will be on streaming within mere months anyway). This is all the more in as they have seen what kind of movies disappointed and what kind of movies have made money since the market assumed its (more or less) present shape in 2023, helped by the minute attentiveness of the relevant press to the trees if not the forest, with this exemplified by Deadline's far from perfect but still handy annual report on Hollywood's biggest profit- and loss-makers (the Most Valuable Blockbusters tournament). Thus have they had that much more opportunity to figure out that if you want a real return on your money you don't simply put up the tentpole and expect people to show, but rather carefully target your cinematic investments, making movies that it seems that some part of the public really, really want to see. (It doesn't have to be brilliant, just wanted, like the video game-based movies from Super Mario Bros. to Minecraft show, and Barbie showed, and the latest Deadpool movie showed.) And thus have they also had that much more opportunity to realize that this is exactly what the studio bosses refuse to do, instead continuing to give (and decline) the green light in the same old way hoping for the same result they used to get, or at least hoped for, as they refuse to admit that it's no longer 2019, when Disney, through years of shamelessly buying up and milking ruthlessly brand names and franchises, made the production of blockbusters on an assembly line look awfully easy by scoring seven billion-dollar hits in one year, including the apex of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's fortunes in the near $3 billion that was Avengers: Endgame, the one studio scoring in that one year almost as many billion-dollar earners as all of Hollywood has managed to produce in almost all the years since (with none approaching Endgame's revenue). Thus not only is it the case that they milk their own franchises by way of sequels no one ever asked for, get flops for their trouble, and tell us that, well, it's good for back catalog value [LINKBACKCATALOG] as any sane person wonders "Is the back catalog value of some movie that was only a middling hit back in nineteen eighty-something really so valuable as to warrant endless sequels and prequels and tie-ins?" but even the non-franchise movies are frequently not that--and only rarely is this due to their being a genuine high-risk bet on what may have seemed at least artistically promising material like One Battle After Another, but rather a matter of their just not being all that well thought-out. (Roofman, the two Big Name leads apart, basically sounds like a quirky indie comedy, unlikely to be a box office colossus--and many a film of the season sounds even less promising--a lot less promising--as a contender for that kind of success.)

Moreover, if said writers aren't smart enough to work all this out (I realize that all the evidence points to these tiresome touters of degrees from "Good Schools" not being smart enough to manage the math, the inference-making, etc.), this humble blog can't be the only place to have written it all up for them. But then I guess that a little digging on the Internet is as far beyond them as the math, though admittedly that isn't the only disincentive. The plain and simple fact remains that the writers for the entertainment pages to admit what gets only reaffirmed ad nauseam with every passing month would leave them with very little to do but repeat themselves as the box office goes from flop to flop, the more in as even if the studio bosses were to suddenly see the light the film slate for 2026, and 2027 too, is already pretty much locked in (all as, of course, the courtiers and claqueurs who hold these jobs, if not smart enough to do the math, are street smart enough to know that saying the truth will not make Hollywood happy). And so instead said writers publicly scratch their heads as they think aloud about how much harder it is to "put people in seats," and for the umpteenth time work through a great many ideas, not all of them irrelevant, yet amid it all miss everything in the picture that really, truly, counts.