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--as, to go by the plausibly authoritative assessment of Jerry Seinfeld on this point, "disorientation" replaces the movie business.

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.