The Media Ignores a Hunger Crisis. (Food Prices and the News Media Today.)

Recent years have seen what has been universally acknowledged by all but the most idiotically committed deniers of hard quantitative fact as spiking food prices, with an effect on the public worse than what is usually reported given the reality that the cheapest items are susceptible to higher-than-average price shocks (the margins were already slight to begin with), with all that means for those who can afford prices least; and what a great many consumers report as a degradation in the quality of many familiar food products (for example, supermarket bakery bread increasingly stale, prone to rapidly molding, etc.), such that the drop in value for the money has fallen relative even to the higher price; neither of which situations gets much coverage. (The price shock at the bottom end of the market tends to be a side remark in the news story if it rates a mention at all, while the signs of lower quality going with the higher prices are the kind of thing you see consumers discussing so much in fora like Reddit or TikTok that "everyone knows" that it's "not just me"--but so far the media hasn't deigned to acknowledge it in any significant way, and at least as yet no attempt at a comprehensive government or academic or other research study has substantiated it.)

Also not getting much coverage is what this really means for the consumer. The media treats us to plenty of grumbling about the price of staples like eggs--but just grumbling, as if it were all a case of essentially comfortable people irked at having to shell out a little more cash for superfluities of life ("You don't really need that!" they are ever quick to tell us), and (certainly if you believe the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" line editors of the Times shovel out to you) this mostly a matter of their being clueless or graceless because the rise in incomes leaves them no worse off. However, with all this coming after a half century of the American worker's purchasing power consistently falling relative to the essentials of everyday life (halved or worse in relation to the price of a home, the price of transportation, the price of health insurance, etc.), one would expect this to mean more hardship out there. And indeed that expectation has actually been affirmed by the statistics of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which show the proportion of U.S. households suffering "food insecurity" (and the more severe "very low food security") in 2021-2023 shooting back up toward the level we saw in the wake of the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, all as there is reason to think things got no better in 2024. (Indeed, given the trend in income among the less affluent, cutbacks to the social safety net, and associated factors, they probably got even worse.)

Even granting that the news media has, in line with its Big Business character, elite staffing, pandering to the affluent reader and viewer, centrist-neoliberal prejudices and general obsequiousness to the powerful and the status quo they favor, never taken much interest in the lot of those who would be represented in the figures just discussed, its disconnect with economic reality seems ever more extreme, and ever more blatantly Agenda-driven. For even as the public faced the sort of hardship that hit it in the immediate wake of that Great Recession that never truly ended their functionaries sneered in our faces "It's Not the Economy, Stupid"--when it is really the case that the measure of stupidity is one's readiness to believe their propaganda.

Europe Rearms. Or Tries To. Sort Of?

Trying to follow a news story from day to day you are apt to find the news media--especially the mainstream news media--deluging them with little bits, typically presented without connections or context, all as what passes for help in making sense of them is the platforming of some Establishment functionary not looking to help you think things through for yourself, but rather eager to tell you what to think, which, because they are an Establishment functionary, is likely to be what they want you to think, irregardless of its relationship to reality (with which Establishment functionaries tend not to be on speaking terms, even though they often know enough to realize that it's not what they are saying). You can only make sense of things when you step back from the onslaught of pseudo-information and put the bits together for yourself--or let someone unlikely ever to get much of a mainstream platform talk you through it properly (as many genuine experts of the kind you won't ever see on the panel shows are perfectly happy to do).

So it has gone with the deluge of news about Europe's rearmament, yet another "news story" that is all sound and fury--and exactly the kind of tale that such sound and fury tends to signify. The leaders of European governments, and European Union institutions, make grand pronouncements, and throw around colossal numbers--hundreds of billions, maybe trillions, of euros, as if they are engaged in a bidding war with monopoly money. Yet, at least to go by what we see in public, the talk is completely unconnected with any specific plans or goals--what these vast sums of money are supposed to actually buy, what Europe's forces will look like after the money has been spent not spelled out. Indeed, they don't even seem to know that such targets might have any use here. And all that is to the extent that one can speak of "Europe's" forces at all. After all, serious talk of the integration and synchronization of European defense forces at the level of their militaries, or even talk of collaboration in the production of the weapons they need (or even what weapons they might be), has been pretty much nonexistent--in spite of how little military power the European governments dispose of individually, how we have seen even immense sums of money soaked up in accomplishing very little (remember Sergeant Olaf "I see nothing!" Scholz's hundred billion euro one-off of a few years ago?), and the hard reality that the rather fragmented and withered defense-industrial bases of the continent's various powers ("We can get you ten tanks by next year! Well, not new tanks, just refurbished tanks. Maybe. Do they actually have to be third-generation?" they say as tanks are getting smashed up by the thousands) can deliver that much less "going their way" rather than being made to pull together. Meanwhile said officials are proving rather artlessly dodgy on the matter of where they expect to get the added personnel for their bigger, more powerful, militaries. (Whatever you do, don't say conscription!)

Instead of such specifics what we get is the kind of grandstanding that makes politics "Showbusiness for Ugly People"--the performers in which Showbusiness never fail to remind the onlooker that in their low-rent corner of the show business world the most coveted role of all is that of war leader, the British leader wanting to be Churchill, the Frenchman wanting to be De Gaulle, the German and Italian wanting to be . . . well, better I leave that to your imaginations. Still, this rather shabby and vulgar display is not without its more practical political purposes. After all, posing as war leaders gives them an excuse to call for "unity," which is a professional politician's way of telling the people at the bottom to stop thinking of the problems of everyday life, and how their elected politicians broke their promises to them, and the way their society's elite are leading them all off a cliff, and instead do as the folks in the commercials in the Starship Troopers movies do when looking at the camera and saying "I'm doing my part!" in that way addicts to Greatest Generation piffle about World War Two just can't get enough of--the more in as the supposed necessity of hundreds of billions more for defense is a long-favorite excuse to take hundreds of billions from everything else, which is after all what they were intent on doing anyway. (Orwell readers, remind me--whether the war is with Eurasia or Eastasia, just who was the "real" enemy again?)

All the same, unserious as they are, and domestically-oriented as their agendas may be ("Those who have little shall have less") one should not trivialize the consequences of the talk for an international scene ever more conflict-ridden, ever more tension-filled, ever more dangerous as what a short time earlier seemed virtually unthinkable (like a major land war raging year after year on the European continent) becomes another hard fact of life over and over and over again. And disgraceful as the international media has been in its coverage of the talk over the money, it has been even more so in its failing to drive home the dangers of that still more serious situation they have so little tried to explain to Europe's publics, very few members of whom are eager to cosplay as Johnny Rico with killer drones flying about under the "leadership" of Sir "Free Gear Keir" Starmer, Monsieur "President of the Rich" Macron, or Herr "Manager der Reichen" Merz, let alone experience the potentially much worse that may lie ahead in an age in which elites absolutely refuse to remember that there is such a thing in the world as nuclear weaponry, and how seriously we have to take the fact of its existence.

Is the Relevance of "Democratic Peace Theory" Declining in Our Time?

It recently seemed to me that we hear less of "democratic peace" theory than we used to do, and indeed I decided to test this impression by checking the frequency of the term's usage logged by Google's Ngram. As it happened, Ngram logged a 37 percent drop in usage of the term between 2013 and 2022--in contrast with the 1139 percent rise it logged in the term's usage between 1986 and 2013.

This surge between the late 1980s and early 2010s, and plunge in the subsequent decade, seems to me very telling, a rough measure of the credence that Fukuyamaesque "liberal triumphalism" enjoyed between the signs that the Cold War was drawing to a close in the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Great Recession that, in spite of much stupid rhetoric about the world having quickly got over it, the event being past, dealt the global economy a blow from which it is still reeling. The result has been the halt and erosion of the global economic integration so evident in the 1986-2007 period, more conflictual relations between the major powers, and of course, more illiberal domestic politics. Indeed, many Establishment commentators openly worry about the polarization of their countries' publics, the collapse of established political parties and the ascent of extremist figures to the national stage, and the propensity of chief executives to invoke emergency measures to get their way. And so now we hear less of democracy's spread, let alone any supposed pacification of the world by it--as instead those who talked much but understood nothing strike tough guy poses as they traffic in old-fashioned realpolitik.

The Decline of L.A. Film Production--and Hollywood's Mystique With It

Looking at the place of film in contemporary culture few would deny that it is less central than it was a few decades ago in what some call "the age of movies," all as Hollywood would seem to have lost something of its romance, something of its glamour. Certainly part of this has been the advent of television and its implications, from the decline of the "theatrical experience," to the collapse of the old studio system "dream factories" with their larger-than-life bosses and "last tycoon" underlings and their More Stars Than in the Heavens and the whole world-within-a-world they seemed to constitute. (Just ask yourself this: can you picture any filmmaker of today doing with the Hollywood of a quarter of a century earlier--the Hollywood of 2000 A.D.--what the great Billy Wilder did with the then-quarter-of-a-century-older Hollywood of Sunset Boulevard? I doubt even the most stubborn contrarian out there would actually try to argue on behalf of a "Yes" answer--while considering this it seems no coincidence that even the makers of new movies about Hollywood are drawn to that earlier period, as Damien Chazelle clearly was in his tale of silent-era Hollywood of a couple of years ago, Babylon.)

That romance and glamour didn't all vanish at once, and indeed hasn't vanished completely even now. (Thus do some still argue over whether the movie star still exists, properly speaking--as many find some amusement in playing "armchair movie executive.") Still, the trend has long been clear, and it can seem to me that other developments have added to it--not least, the decline of Hollywood as a place, and one might add, the romance of that place's location. The idea that this magical world-within-a-world overspread some forty square miles or so of golden Southern California when "California" and "Los Angeles" had been names to conjure with in a way less the case today--that here was where it all happened, with the bosses having their offices here, and the movies shot on the studio lots, and the stars and everyone else involved living and working and playing here--seems to have added to its fascination, with even darker or more satirical portraits of the place (like Nathanael West's Day of the Locust or B.P. Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?) paying tribute to that fascination in their way. In recent decades, with production venturing to places like Vancouver or Atlanta to exploit ill-conceived corporate welfare schemes that in rather on the nose fashion underline just how much politics is "Showbusiness for ugly people," that sense of American filmmaking as in some way an enchanted world of its own is going--and if that is a small thing next to the livelihoods upended as many workers in the field find themselves forced to relocate if they are to go on working in their jobs at all, and a deindustrialized Southland suffers yet another blow to its economy, it still remains the case that this dispersal is also taking another part of the industry's long-fading glamour, most likely for good.

Of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the Fortunes of Great Powers

Looking back it can seem plausible that Hollywood's centrality within the film world in the twentieth century reflected America's centrality within the world economy in the same century--the country's having been the scene of a techno-industrial-commercial revolution that had it accounting for a third (and for some decades, even more) of the world economy, its productive methods a model for even those most skeptical of America's social model, its wealth a source of unprecedented power in the world for its businesses and its government, and its people, if far from fully sharing in the gains, still to a significant extent having a standard and way of living that fascinated the rest of the world. (Consumer culture as we know it, the auto-subtopian existence that Americans equate with a decent living standard--this was where they all began.)

It is commonly the case that when a country enjoys a "golden age" in the material ways it also enjoys a golden age culturally--great art, alas, that much less likely to appear in a time of stagnation, decline, poverty--and the American century was no exception. The fascination of many in the Old World was tinged with anxiety and even repulsion as they contemplated what seemed to them the "land of the future," with many thinking it a comparatively cultureless place--but then they tended to think in terms of old forms and old standards, with little receptivity to the new (like upper class, Eton-and-Balliol College-educated Briton Aldous Huxley sneering at modernity, progress, egalitarianism in the all too often uncritically taken Brave New World). The comparative vastness of the American film market afforded filmmakers prospects for resourcing their filmmaking greater than were to be had anywhere else in the world, with all that meant the technical potentials of American film, and the fascination of the rest of the world with American cultural products inextricable from America's more material strengths, had their part in bringing Hollywood films a world market, and drawing to Hollywood talent from far afield (with alongside the "push" effect of the interwar and Second World War years the "pull" of Hollywood enriching Hollywood with a generation of Central European talent in particular).

Amid all that, in an era in which America was in spite of the snobs making its mark within the high culture of the Western world, but "high culture" was increasingly taking on a decadent cast in its flight from contemporary reality and its challenges--a flight in which it continues a century on--such that one may argue for Hollywood having been to America's golden age what those nations' output in literature and the more traditional visual arts had been for Renaissance Italy, the Spanish, the Dutch and others in their periods as leading powers, all as the decline of Hollywood can seem in respects to track the decline of American power. Riding high in the years after World War II the decline of the studio system can seem to parallel the decline of the Bretton Woods-based world economic order, with an air of decadence setting in this cultural milieu as well about the time the country went off the gold standard, and the end of the "New Hollywood" and the onset of the crass high concept/blockbuster era going hand in hand with the ascent of neoliberalism, deindustrialization, the hollowing out of an economy living on speculation fueled by central bankers giving away free money to "investors." Indeed, reading Daniel Bessner's great article in Harper's last year, Hollywood can seem a microcosm of the larger economy in the age of short-termism and "shareholder value" and merger and acquisition games run amok, of traffic in old brands rather than the building up of new ones as the taking that is speculating edges out making, of global arbitrage in labor and other costs, declining prospects for the many as compensation explodes for a handful of "winners," and the general crapuleux idiocy and vulgarity that is the norm at the top in such times.

After decades of all that few would think either Hollywood or the American economy in a particularly healthy state--as those disheartened by the situation and desirous of regeneration find few grounds for hope in a scene where the self-satisfied elite thinks that it need only "stay the course," and the only alternatives that seem to ever get a mainstream are no alternatives at all. They offer just the same old thing in a rather thin new guise, a sequel no one ever asked for to a movie that wasn't worth seeing the first time.

Where Do Authors Stand Within the World of Celebrity?

Recently considering the standing of the novel today[LINK TO PIECE ABOUT DECLINE OF NOVEL], and the matter of celebrity[LINK TO NEW PIECE], it occurred to me that while I have written about celebrity of various kinds (that of actors, of musicians, of athletes), and even celebrity as such, I have not discussed authors much from that standpoint. I suppose that I did not even think to do so reflects the reality that authors, while not excluded from the world of celebrity when they attain a certain level of success, or at least visibility, also do not rank all that highly within the world of celebrity--in our times at least.

Consider those things that make a celebrity a celebrity rather than merely famous, or even merely famous because

1. They are not just famous, but famous among the general public in a "household name" way.

2. They tend to be highly visible--not just their name but their face well-known, in part because the public sees them at whatever work it is that makes them famous (on the screen or the stage or in the stadium where they give them an entertaining show).

3. Their performance tends to at least appear highly individual, and to be made possible by an extraordinary personal talent.

4. They are perceived as not just accomplished, but glamorous.

Consider how writers stack up here against, for example, singers.

In a culture where the written word matters less and less and fewer people pay attention to books, accomplishment in letters is less likely to make anyone a "household name."

Even if they do become famous we are more likely to know their names than their faces, in part because what they do doesn't lend itself to showy display before a public. The actor acts, the singer sings, the athlete plays in front of us. The writer doesn't write in front of us. In fact, when we see them they are taking time away from their writing, likely because their publishing contract made them do it--all as watching them write, aside from not being really interesting, wouldn't be a "performance" in the same way, the "performance" instead what we get when what they work on is published and we read it.

In part because few people pay attention to books, and because the accomplishment of a writer lacks that kind of performative-visual aspect, many simply don't recognize talent in writing the way they do acting or singing or athletic accomplishment. Personally moved by an actor or singer's performance, or perhaps even more easily impressed by an athletic feat. (Seeing a player hitting one out of the park, making a full-court shot, and of course, scoring four touchdowns in a single game, even people who know virtually nothing about the sport are likely ro know they have seen something extraordinary.) By contrast in the minds of many "anyone" can string words together, while the appraisal of the result is simply "subjective" (as every failing composition student is quick to say).

And of course, there is the plain and simple fact that writing is seen as "nerdish" in a way other artistic endeavor is not--with all that means in a nerd-bashing and generally anti-intellectual culture, and its prospects for glamorousness. It is the case, too, that publishing is less a young person's scene than the performing arts or sports, that the ability to spellbind with the written word is less likely to be linked to physical appearance or charisma than is the case with those who spellbind an audience from a stage.

Of course, like many others writers are for all that encouraged to constantly exploit and deepen whatever celebrity they may have, as seen in the aforementioned rituals of book publicity, like those book signings that the makers of atrocious films and television shows about authors love to shoehorn into the revolting crap they foist on the viewing public . And should an author, for example, see their book made into a movie doubtless they get some of the reflected glory of the Cinema. Still, if the movie reaches a bigger audience it is those who starred in the movie that I suspect people are more likely to associate with it than the author of the source material--the words "The Hunger Games" probably conjuring up in far more minds the image of Jennifer Lawrence than that of Suzanne Collins. The result is that even if after having made the journey to Park Avenue they take a second trip from there to Tinseltown, they are not likely to become truly of Tinseltown barring their becoming something other than a writer of fiction.

In all that there can seem a pattern. The low stature of authors within the celebrity world means that much less interest in what they do, while the lack of interest in what they do further depresses their stature--reflecting and reinforcing the shift of contemporary culture's center of gravity away from the written word in our time.

What Makes a Famous Person a "Celebrity?"

When we speak of celebrity we generally seem to take for granted that "everyone knows" what the term means--perhaps less unreasonably than when using a great many other terms with a sociological significance, but still not unproblematically. After all, the simplest and most common definition of "celebrity" is "a famous person," but I think most will agree that fame by itself does not a celebrity make, many people quite famous without being celebrities properly speaking. The result is that it seems worth spelling out the concept.

For a start, there seems some expectation that a celebrity not only be famous, but famous with the general public for having "done something great"; that people in general know who they are; that we can speak of them as a "household name." By way of contrast with this consider the case of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. They are certain to be very well-known within their field. They are likely to get considerable media attention on the day that the Nobel Academy holds the awards ceremony. However, unless they somehow parlay their stature as a scientist into a broader "public intellectual" status, at least, very few people are likely to know who they are--in comparison with those categories of person we are more likely to associate with "celebrity," such as actors, singers and athletes.

The obscurity of even scientists at the top of their field by comparison with actors and singers and athletes seems importantly reflective of the logic of celebrity, which status (especially in our day) has a lot to do with a certain kind of individual visibility. If you are a celebrity people know your face, in part because they have seen the celebrity's face while they were doing what it was that made them famous. People saw them perform in a dramatic or musical production, or play in a game. By contrast a scientist's work, however hard, brilliant, important, publicized it may be, does not make for a "show" the same way. The work goes on largely in their heads, with its physical aspects conducted in laboratories away from public view, the evidences of what went on there presented to the world in their published papers unclear or even incomprehensible to the layperson, etc., etc., such that it simply cannot make the same impact on their imaginations. And while the public by and large retains an obsolete view of science as an intensively individualistic endeavor (because it serves certain political or dramatic purposes than for any other reason), it is harder to ignore the increasingly collaborative reality of the sciences. This is not just because there is typically a lot of less celebrated work paving the way for the "breakthroughs" that gets so much attention, but because anyone who can simply count notices how many names were on the byline of that paper reporting that important discovery, and the contrast it makes with the ferociously individual accomplishment with which celebrity is associated, which is typically expected to come from a particular place, namely talent that no "ordinary" person possesses and can never make up for the lack of no matter how hard they work--not diligence, but prowess. And of course, there is what is supposed to follow from exceptional prowess, namely wealth, luxury, adulation by the many, their being sought after and desired, others fantasizing about being them (or being with them, the aspect of sex not to be underrated, perhaps the more in as society is getting more puritanical about this)--in short, glamour. Few consider even the most accomplished scientist in such terms--as indeed scientists laugh (perhaps not without some bitterness) at the ridiculous glamorization of their field by Hollywood.

Taken altogether this picture--combining general renown, individual visibility achieved through personal prowess lending itself to visual display, and winning the visible rewards that prowess is supposed to win--seems to me to cover the territory--what in Veblenian terms is its essential simple-minded barbarism--pretty well, though I think it worthwhile to acknowledge that I am describing an ideal here at an extreme end of the spectrum, and that some may fall in between the questionable "celebrity" of a famed scientist at one end, the more conventional celebrity of a famed singer or athlete at the other.

At the same time the matter can be somewhat confused by those who ordinarily would not really make the cut but try to make it seem as if they do--people who are famous, but intent on being celebrities, and helped in their quest by their courtiers and claqueurs within a fairly willing media. As with plutocrats who seem unlikely candidates for the performance of any great artistic or athletic or any other sort of feat before the eyes of the public (which doesn't necessarily stop them from trying to be, say, Brazilian jiu-jitsu champions), but whom they shove their faces in our faces all the time as their partisans keep telling us what "geniuses" and "supermen" they are. ("Smarter than you, smarter than you!" they insist, the more stridently insofar as they know they are irritating us.) At the same time, living in the age of reality TV we are deluged with people who are highly visible without being in any evident way accomplished--one reason, I think, why I have personally been resistant to recognizing reality "stars" as celebrities--though in the culture in which we live it is common to think of "being rich and famous" as somehow a worthy achievement in itself, entirely befitting that Veblenian conception of barbarism on which all this ultimately rests.

The (Illusory) Accessibility of the Literary Path to Celebrity

In considering the motivations for becoming a writer Upton Sinclair in Money Writes!, if possessing the highest regard for literature and those who go about the task heroically, did not mince words about the crasser side of the matter--indeed taking a rather sneering view of many of those who do try to become writers. As he acknowledges, living in a society where most can expect at best an objectively crummy working class life, constantly tantalized by the thought of how much better others than they were living, and told not to expect anything better or fairer by way of a change in society and instead look to their own efforts to raise themselves up within the hierarchy--to, as drawing on Pestalozzi he puts it, grow from fish into pikes--they credulously look to do just that. With celebrity the only alternative to crime as a way of dramatically changing their fortunes they try to become such, with many of them hitting on "becoming a writer."

Considering this it seems fair to attend not just to the attractions that writing has for many (a writer's independence, etc.) but also the seeming accessibility of the path. In contrast with, for example, being a musician, where one needs to at least know how to play an instrument, a would-be writer, strictly speaking, would seem to need only the literacy that has become universal to make a start. The material requirements (something to write with, a place where they can get some quiet and some privacy) may be hard for some to get, but are at least low in comparison with a musician's need for instruments and a place to practice, or the more specialized material and work space needed by many a visual artist. They may want and benefit from the help of others, but compared with a musician looking to organize a band, an actor organizing a troupe, a budding filmmaker trying to get together the cast and equipment for even the most bare-bones production, it can seem a thing they can do without if they must. And certainly in contrast with those in the performing arts they are under less pressure to bear the expenses of travel, let alone relocate entirely to a possibly unfamiliar and distant place on what may be very slender resources and few prospects of a living wage (it is no accident that so many of those who managed to become actors, even when their biographies do not indicate any significant help from connections, hail from the southern California and Tri-State areas), only their manuscript needing to travel--all as, indeed, they never have to stand in person before an audience.

Of course, what followed was rarely as tidy as those who thought his way expected. Then as now the writer's path was far and away most likely to prove a walk down a boulevard of broken dreams. But the start at least seems more plausible, and may seem to have become more so since Sinclair's day, with most of the likely candidates having some access to a computer, and the research resources of the Internet, and the option of submitting their work electronically, at no marginal cost. (I recall editors insisting on those wretched Self-Addressed Stamped Envelopes long after e-mail became a practical alternative and explaining this in public statements by saying that the added hassle and expense of mailing them was a way of eliminating "the bozo factor"--making those submitting to them waste their time to no useful end in that way idiot entitled authority figures love to do with those over whom they have power, and for whom they have only contempt. But they have become fewer with the years.) It has also been the case that those who get their fill of the form rejection letters, as mechanical and inhuman and demoralizing in our time as they were when young Martin Eden faced them, now have the option of self-publishing a book in print and electronic editions for no marginal cost at all, provided they are willing to do all the requisite work of turning their manuscript into a book themselves. Still, given what "the wages of writing" tell us about the returns to effort here the odds of a career have only worsened, not improved--so much so perhaps that, especially as alternative paths to celebrity unheard of in Sinclair's day beckon, it seems to me very plausible that people are losing interest in being writers someday, looking past the books telling them they can teach them to be a writer to the ones telling them they can teach them to be an online "influencer" instead.

Novel Reading a "Cultic" Activity By 2034: How Fares the Prediction?

Back in a 2009 interview with The Daily Beast Philip Roth predicted that in a quarter of a century, and likely less, novel reading would be "cultic," invoking the number of people still engaged in "reading Latin poetry in the original" as a point of comparison for how little it would be done (the circle of novel readers not quite as small as that, but not much greater).

In 2025 we are about two-thirds of the way to twenty-five years from his standpoint. Personally I think that his prediction for the state of things in 2034 is more dire than the reality is likely to be--but not so very much more dire. Consider how

* In the late '00s and early '10s young adult books were all the rage, and the trajectory that ended up following. At least part of the story was a lack of excitement about books for adults, and "adults" looking for easier reads, as well as young adult interest, with all that suggests for the vibrancy of letters and for the prevailing level of literacy--while the way the bubble popped circa 2015 without anything to compare since can seem suggestive of people of all ages doing even less reading than that.

* Whole genres of popular fiction have withered and all but vanished (consider where action-adventure fiction stands today relative to where it was circa 1990), as in other cases we have seen stagnation (certainly to go by how, for example, the "club" of bestselling authors of other kinds of thriller has seen just the same old names from year to year, decade to decade, old names surviving on likely dwindling numbers of old loyalists, instead of new successes).

* Even as Big Publishing mounted its counter-revolution against the e-book with sensational success, the mass-market paperback still disappeared from the shops for lack of buyers--and how the media treated both events as virtually non-stories.

* The slight impact of even recent bestsellers on the wider culture, as seen in the fact that for many years the film adaptations of even colossal bestsellers simply do not become first-rank blockbusters the way they did a short time earlier; and how, even with pop culture a principal terrain of the kulturkampf and all its obscene noxiousness, books constitute an ever-smaller part of the controversy, especially when we get away from the mainly symbolic fights over very limited aspects of the contents of school libraries. (By contrast the kind of arguments that people had over a book like Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, and certainly the way in which a serious social scientist like William Whyte discussed the book as sociologically relevant in his study of "the organization man,", aren't even a possibility now.)

Consider, too, the implications of a declining interest in literature and the humanities on college campuses that has gone so far as talk of the "end of the English major"--which I suspect is not just a response to the sneers at those subjects by the morons who pass for thought-leaders, or the (very understandable) worries about the earning prospects of those who major in them in a time of ever more outrageous tuition, worsening prospects for college graduates and a tendency on the part of employers to reward more vocationally-oriented course work and the demonstration of quantitative skills at the expense of other kinds of credentials and training, but simple disinterest among the young. The causes of the situation are numerous, but one that I do think worth stressing what Mr. Roth's biographer Blake Bailey acknowledges after a long career as a biographer of such figures, that the day when endeavoring to write "the great American novel" seemed a heroic endeavor is behind us, simply because "Nobody's paying attention"--a remark that, in contrast with the boosterism we usually get about book sales, the publishing business, reading, when we get coverage of them at all seems to me a breath of fresh air for its frankness. Indeed, even those who really find themselves taken with the written word are, if fancying a career that would lead to something better than a crummy working class existence, probably more likely to set up a camera and try to become "influencers" than pour their heart and soul into a manuscript, especially as the disappointment self-publishing has been proves ever harder to deny, and the never very likely path to acceptance on Park Avenue only continues to grow more implausible.

Bond 26 Finally in Development? Some Thoughts

For years now the press has buzzed about an upcoming "Bond 26"--almost entirely on the basis of no actual information, instead simply recycling stale franchise gossip, offering speculations about the usual subjects ("Will Henry Cavill be the next James Bond?" they ask for the mind-numbing billionth time), and little "If I Were the Studio Boss"-type "think" pieces. A thin substitute for actual news, this clickbaity crap got very, very wearisome indeed. However those who follow the matter finally did get some real news this past February in the report that Amazon MGM had finally acquired complete creative control over the franchise, cutting the Broccoli family-Michael Wilson combination out of the picture entirely, after which there were at least semi-solid reports of development of a new Bond film being "fast-tracked" for production and "development" underway under the supervision of Amy Pascal and David Heyman with an eye to getting said film into theaters before the end of 2027.

Previously considering the lack of movement on the part of the franchise-runners in the over three year period since the release of the last Bond film (the Daniel Craig era capper No Time to Die) my guess had been that the executives were showing some caution and sitting tight given the huge question marks hanging over the film market since the pandemic, and what, after things started settling in 2023, we have seen of the post-pandemic market. This has been a significantly shrunken market for theatrical releases much less receptive to "tentpole"-type blockbusters than was the case a decade ago, where movies still can make big money but audiences have to be really excited for them if they are to come out at all, with the Bond films' standing here shaky in light of No Time to Die's softer gross and particular underperformance with the young, encouraging them to bide their time with this one, letting the field lie fallow, and given how insistent they were on coming back, at least trying to do so with something that a sizable audience would "really want."

Of course, as I have myself remarked, the studio bosses have been extremely resistant to these lessons, and now I suspect that those in charge of 007 were no exceptions to that pattern--that the delay has not been a reflection of the Suits showing some well-warranted circumspection about another go with another (let us be frank here) absolutely unnecessary iteration of a thoroughly exhausted franchise that could easily be left in the past, but rather the usual fight for control and egos and general stupidity that are the real "skill set" of the managerial class sitting atop the commanding heights of the economy here as well as everywhere else. This is, if anything, affirmed by the choice of producers for the project. In giving ex-Sony Boss Amy Pascal (who did as boss of that studio preside in some degree over prior Bond films) a closer involvement in this new film Amazon is bringing on board a toxic vulgarian unredeemed by any great competence. (As Sony CEO she actually seemed to have less grasp of the direction her own business was moving in than a casual reader of the Penske publications, while if the Suits' courtiers prefer to talk her up as having had a part in the success of Spider-Man--perhaps--we can also credit her with believing Will "The Slap" Smith's After Earth was the next Star Wars.) Coproducing the film with her is a dude who spent the last decade giving the world the profoundly ill-conceived cash grab that was the ultimately failed Fantastic Beasts series (in which, rather ominously for Bond, he banked on the affections of an aging audience that the producers took too much for granted as they signally failed to win over the younger crowd on the way to disappointing and dwindling ticket sales).

No, there was no sign of a learning process here, and the only thing about this whole situation that surprises me, really, is that I gave the folks running this show the benefit of the doubt, in this case leading me to have likely overestimated them. Moreover, none of this seems to me to bode well for the franchise at present, the more in as those who would make a successful Bond film in this market (or for that matter, any action film from a long-running franchise in this market) have such a big and difficult task on their hands. Of course, they may yet surprise us. But that's just it--their making a movie that really succeeds, artistically or commercially, would be a surprise, especially to the extent that the figures named here are able to claim any credit for said success.

Why Don't Kurosawa's Films with Contemporary Settings Get More Attention?

Recently Hunter Derensis published a piece with Responsible Statecraft looking back at Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear--his drama about a family head suffering from anxiety about the very real prospect of nuclear war. As Derensis notes, the movie "is considered one of Kurosawa's minor works, lost in the shadow of his masterpieces." While some of those masterpieces have contemporary settings (Ikiru was sufficiently well-regarded to get a remake just a couple of years ago by Oliver Hermanus as Living), any listing of these, at least in the English-speaking world (and certainly in the United States), is apt to be dominated by Kurosawa's samurai-era films, the many films Kurosawa made about modern life, some of which are, again, acknowledged masterpieces, much, much less discussed. Just why is that?.

I can think of three reasons.

1. Here interest in Kurosawa, even among the relatively sophisticated and none too large group of people who would recognize the name, is substantially an extension of their interest in some very popular American/Western movies, which Kurosawa's films have been credited with inspiring. I suspect that more people know Kurosawa as the maker of a movie supposed to have inspired Star Wars than for any other reason (The Hidden Fortress). They also know him as the maker of a movie that inspired The Magnificent Seven, and thus in a way "grandfather" to innumerable direct and indirect derivatives of that move in its turn, all the way down to Rebel Moon (Seven Samurai). And they know him for having made still another movie that inspired For a Few Dollars, and the "Man with no Name" trilogy (Yojimbo). And their interest pretty much comes to an end there (the more in as an occasional Living is the kind of movie that gets Oscar nominations rather than breaks box office records).

2. Not only Americans but even American film buffs see comparatively little foreign film, and when they do mainly take an interest when a foreign movie very obviously offers something Hollywood isn't giving them at home. Admittedly serious drama about contemporary life has probably never been Hollywood's forte, but samurai sword-fighting is more obviously "exotic." Possibly reinforcing this is (to go by that whole Goethe-Schiller-Brecht theory about the division between the experience of the "epic" and the "dramatic") their finding it hard to get into a contemporary drama when it is obviously set in a foreign culture, and uses another language and requires them to read subtitles (especially as Americans, and Anglosphere film consumers generally, probably do less of that than their foreign counterparts), whereas this interferes less with their kicking back and enjoying an adventure set in a time long past in a distant place.

3. American critics may well be put off by what Kurosawa does with his contemporary dramas--certainly in a film like the nuclear war-themed I Live in Fear. Consider the matter this way: how many American movies of the 1950s addressed the theme of nuclear war, and especially the psychological effect of an ever-present danger of nuclear war on "ordinary" people, in so direct a fashion? Without any science fiction-al trappings or disaster movie spectacle, but rather contemporary drama, like this? (Especially if, as Derensis suggests we do, we rule out the very recent Oppenheimer, which not incidentally had such an unconventional method of presentation, and which the idiots in the media so often insisted, in spite of director Christopher Nolan's own explicit statements in substantive interviews, was not about nuclear war, but instead "AI.") Had there been such a film the critics would not have been friendly, trotting out the great "art lie" that still stands a century after Upton Sinclair Mammonart about "politics" being incompatible with the "true art" that necessarily confines itself to "timeless truths" (i.e. the prejudices of the idiot of a critic in question), and sneer at the results. Giving it a second look today they might well do the same--as usual when they behave in the conventional ways, doing Kurosawa's film an injustice, and leaving us culturally the poorer as they fail in their duty once more.

Robert Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript, and the Rise of Hitler

Robert Ludlum's The Chancellor Manuscript revolves around the pursuit of J. Edgar Hoover's secret files by competing members of America's "secret government," Inver Brass--and Peter Chancellor's haplessly finding himself in the middle of that deadly contest. However, Chancellor's first encounter with Inver Brass was over a quite different document, an actual "Chancellor Manuscript"--his doctoral dissertation. The reason why Inver Brass took an interest in such a seemingly mundane matter was its subject, Chancellor's historical research into the causes of World War II having revealed the role of American business in the building up of the Nazis, without which they would never have been in a position to pursue their war of aggression. ("The multinational corporations," the "colossi of international finance," a category that included "A number of the most honored industrial names in America" "could not feed the Nazi wolf pack fast enough," as they "conveniently overlooked," "obscured," "tolerated, ultimately accepted" the "wolf pack's objectives and methods" for the sake of "the swiftly rising lines on profit-and-loss charts.") The folks at Inver Brass meant to see that the dissertation was not accepted--and the findings not published--and Chancellor denied his academic career with all to which it might lead, for they saw it as part of their function "to protect men and institutions from the moral indictments borne of hindsight," and the more in as they were certain that "what was anathema today" had been "right forty years ago."

The kind of self-serving elite rationale that holds that what is good for the rich and powerful is good for the country, and that next to their notion of "order" and "stability" such little things as equality under the law, the responsibility that goes with power, the principles of democracy and historical truth count for nothing--ever preached to us by their lackeys in government, media, the Academy and elsewhere--we are little surprised to find out what those folks really are when the novel's real game begins, and these figures who think themselves the "best and brightest" quickly prove a pack of vile villains in what has long seemed to me the culmination of Ludlum's pre-shoot 'em up efforts, and perhaps his strongest work (Trevayne its only real competition). This seems to me the more the case given the specific revelations implied in the discussion. We may be a long way from when young Mr. Chancellor was making his investigation (1968), and today revelations about American businessmen being in bed with the Nazis are, for many, old news, with even worse than Ludlum hinted at long and well and even minutely established in the historiography. Indeed, we now know that such "honored industrial names" not only built up the Nazi war machine but went on producing critical material for it in Germany and German-occupied Europe even after the U.S. and Germany declared war on each other, sometimes with German-furnished slave labor, and selling even American-based production to Germany through third countries, practically until V-E Day--and that not only short-term profit but a powerful ideological sympathy was frequently operative (all as, of course, the government again and again looked the other way and never showed much interest in holding even outright law-breaking to real account).

However, the tendency in the history most likely to reach beyond the limited audience of intellectuals interested in such things remains to downplay all that in favor of more patriotic, "We're all doing our part!" "Greatest Generation" stuff. Indeed, in thinking about the rise of Hitler the tendency in the more popular historiography is to sideline the role of not just American business but business generally in Nazism's rise, brushing aside the reality that German business played the decisive role in putting Hitler in power for the sake of getting a government that would crush the left, break organized labor, and thus not only safeguard Property but boost Profitability by holding down wages and social outlays as it poured money into the only kind of "Big Government" their kind wholeheartedly approve, the military-industrial complex; and the fact that Hitler meant to and did deliver what they wanted; such that however much German businessmen grumbled the fact remained that German business did very, very well out of the arrangement all the way through the war as it benefited from the massive war spending and looting of occupied countries (exemplified by the data on how much more, and more modern, industrial capital German business had at war's end, and the way in which, thanks to its being allowed to hold onto it, it enabled Germany's post-war economic miracle).

Consistent with this the tendency is to rely on Cold Warrior fever dreams about the Madness of Crowds in the Age of Totalitarianism (by way of such as Hannah Arendt), theories about an unhappy sort of German "exceptionalism" (via figures like William Shirer and Daniel Goldhagen), and the dark side of the Great Man of history theory (through people like Allan Bullock), to explain the Third Reich, all as, with far rightist views increasingly mainstream, we are told that Nazism was unavoidable riposte to, or somehow even extension of, the Bolshevik Revolution (by way of a Timothy Snyder's historiography, or an Alice Weidel demonstrating the real intellectual caliber of the "highly educated" international elite from which this "populist" derives with her exceedingly transparent lie that Hitler "was a Communist").* Anything, it seems, will do but the obvious, the logical, the factually grounded, for such is not only the way intellectual life runs in our era, with its embrace of the contempt for hard fact and economic interest that Arendt was so quick to chalk up to the "totalitarians," the more in as the facts are so inconvenient for those who flatter themselves that they are the best and brightest of today.

"The Not So Good War": Robert Ludlum's World War II

Looking back on the profusion of bestselling spy thrillers set during World War II in the 1970s it has seemed to some, myself included, plausible that the popularity of World War II as a setting for such thrillers was that it seemed a less fraught period in which, in contrast with a period where in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Frank Church hearings, détente, and much, much else, and any pretense of there being a consensus about the goodness of the West's security states against villainous Soviets was rather less tenable than it had seemed some years earlier, people could still broadly agree on who were the "good guys" and "bad guys." (Certainly this seems to well describe Ken Follett's blockbuster The Eye of the Needle, with its good guy Britons vs. bad guys Nazis plot, all as those more enduring novels then set in the present, like John le Carre's Karla trilogy, or Graham Greene's The Human Factor, tended to take a more jaundiced view of the West's relations with the developing world.)

Still, looking at Robert Ludlum's use of World War II in his books one gets something other than a flight into patriotic simplicities--his plots typically having American business in bed with the Nazis. Thus did it go in The Scarlatti Inheritance, where a scion of an American industrial dynasty used his family's fortune to bankroll the National Socialist Party at an early stage of its development. Ludlum set the first part of his later The Gemini Contenders during the war--but then ties that legacy in with the very present political struggles between a power-mad and militaristic Army officer and his liberal brother, while in The Rhinemann Exchange, Ludlum's only novel set entirely during World War II, American industry made a Faustian pact with its German counterparts. (U.S. industry needed to deliver a gyroscope to the Army for its bombers, which it did not have but which the Germans did have; while the Germans needed diamonds for their missile program, to which the Americans had superior access; and each sought to trade what they had for what they needed, with all that implied about America's own elite in even those romanticized times.) One could also see it all tied together in what is in many ways the high-water mark of Robert Ludlum's more intensely Anti-Establishment work, The Chancellor Manuscript, where his protagonist Peter Chancellor, nearing the end of grad school and about to embark on a career as a professor of history, sees his career derailed by the machinations of the country's "secret government" Inver Brass precisely because they do not want his dissertation's investigation into the financing of the Nazis, and what it said about "a number of the most honored industrial names in America"--an investigation to which he was drawn, Chancellor's own thoughts tell us, because of the infuriating "parallels with the present" of that episode with the present at the height of the Vietnam War (1968) that made it all too clear how "Nothing had changed . . . the lies of forty years ago still exist[ing]" and leaving him with the duty of telling the story, something he did even after his academic career was quashed. At the suggestion of the Inver Brass functionary whose job it was to prevent Chancellor's revelations as history he proceeded to a career as a novelist in which he told the truth in the guise of fiction--a metafictional touch that, perhaps playfully, perhaps not entirely so, invites us to wonder how much of what we are reading is history as the members of that secret government itself begin to contend with one another over possession of the files of J. Edgar Hoover. The past thus appears no different from the very fraught present--and indeed a reminder that far from the discontents of the moment being exceptional and passing, the Establishment was always rotten, and its agents in the moment working to elide memory itself where it was an obstacle to their objects.

What Does the Word "Markets" Mean to You? (Reflections on an Episode of Good Times)

In the Good Times episode "Where Have All the Doctors Gone?" (season 6, episode 17) Ms. Florida Evans and Dr. Paula Kelly had an exchange regarding the latter's intention of leaving the clinic where she works--a departure that, as she is the last doctor still working there, would mean the closing down of the clinic on which the residents of the neighborhood is reliant. In the course of said exchange Dr. Kelly, whose decision is admittedly about heading for greener pastures, tells Ms. Evans that she thinks the sacrifices she made in working at the clinic did not do much good anyway given the irresponsibility of the neighborhood's residents in regard to their health, as judged by, among other things, their diets. Ms. Evans replies that "in the ghetto" the issue is not health but "survival," its impoverished residents having no choice but to " buy what is cheapest, and the markets make damn sure it isn't cheap" (emphasis added).

To much of the public (and indeed, not just the public) that is exactly what markets are--the institution that makes sure that the necessities of life aren't cheap, that they are as expensive as the traffic will bear, to the benefit of corporate bottom lines and the disadvantage of the rest of society.

It can seem characteristic of the different era in which this show was a top ten hit that the dialogue acknowledged this view here so explicitly--that, indeed, the show was so socially critical, in this episode directing its barbs at even the medical profession before which television is usually reverent in this superficially irreverent era (the supposedly past exaltation of the doctor as a "god in a white coat" enduring here). It can seem characteristic of that era, too, that it showed parents like the Evanses who, in spite of not being "highly educated professionals," were clearly functional, conscientious, responsible, intelligent people; who in spite of being functional, conscientious, responsible, intelligent people did not have an upper-middle class, suburban, standard of living; and that the show showed such a person quite able to get the better of the highly educated professional above her in the social scale in an exchange that is not an occasion for the sort of cheap anti-intellectualism we see when figures like Frasier Crane are made fools of, but, beneath the one-liners, a serious dialogue about a serious subject.

Meanwhile it can seem characteristic of the way we live now that the actor who was for many (unfortunately) the face, or at least mascot, of that show recently went on TV in commercials in which he did his bit for the privatization of Medicare, all as the market made sure that health care, along with all the other necessities of life, grow ever less cheap.

Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2024 Tournament: Some Thoughts

Deadline has (finally) presented the results of its Most Valuable Blockbusters tournament.

Reviewing the list of champions I was unsurprised to see Dune make the top ten (#7), Wicked the top five (#5), Despicable Me rank higher than Wicked (#4), Deadpool rank higher than that (#3), Moana higher still (#2) and Inside Out 2 land the top spot (#1). I was also unsurprised to see It Ends with Us place (#6), and Kung Fu Panda also make the cut (#8). And while I didn't mention them in the post that I wrote before the holidays (even if it only got up in early January) after seeing their grosses I wasn't surprised to see late holiday releases Mufasa or Sonic 3 round out the group (ranking at #9 and #10 respectively).

Of course, that leaves the matters of the smaller movies that turned relatively large profits, and of the year's biggest failures. I had no expectations about the "small movies, big profits" category, except that if It Ends with Us failed to make the top ten list it would end up here--and, I suppose, that horror movies would be a strong presence. That didn't happen, of course, leaving us with a list made up entirely of the year's higher-profile horror movies (A Quiet Place and Nosferatu followed by Smile 2, Speak No Evil and Longlegs). By contrast I did have expectations about the biggest flops, and I was, again, unsurprised that Joker 2 got the #1 spot, and that Furiosa, Megalopolis and Borderlands accounted for the next three places. (I had thought that Megalopolis would get the #2 spot, rather than #4, but it seems Lionsgate did well in the pre-Cannes screening foreign deals, such that the foreign distributors suffered much more from paying $50 million for rights to a movie that grossed just $7 million--a reminder that estimates are only that in the absence of knowledge of the details of the dealmaking.) I didn't have anything to say about Kraven the Hunter, but it's goetting the number five spot (for Sony's Spider-Man Universe movie it might be it still had a $110 million production budget, with a marketing budget to match) was, again, no shocker.

That said, I do not think the "smaller hits" or "biggest flops" lists tell us very much about the state of the market these days. That we had five horror movies on the "smaller hits" list is pretty consistent with past experience, and only affirms the old truism that horror remains by far the most consistently successful way to turn a relatively large profit on a small movie. The list of flops similarly affirms old truisms. Joker 2's colossal ($144 million in the red) failure merely demonstrates that if a successful filmmaker is intent on making his the sequel to a major hit of his a flop that will ruin any legacy he may have achieved with its predecessor, is empowered to act in such a fashion, and makes the fullest use of that opportunity by displaying utter, hate-filled, contempt for his fans, he has a fair chance of succeeding. Meanwhile Furiosa's flopping underlines the extent to which Mad Max: Fury Road was a money-losing flop rather than the success the financial illiterates of the press made it out to be back in 2015, and the hazards of making big-budget releases about side characters, the audience's limited appetite for prequels generally, and the dubious prospects of a film reliant on a connection with a release from a decade earlier. Megalopolis was another example of how "directorial vision" can miscarry at the box office, while Borderlands and Kraven the Hunter each seem footnotes in the stories of the video game adaptation and the superhero film, respectively. If Borderlands flopped very badly that was a matter of a much-delayed, bad buzz-burdened, poorly reviewed dump month release hitting theaters when a mega-hit was carrying everything before it, and far less significant than the many successes the genre has been piling up recently (most recently, Minecraft); while the December release of Kraven the Hunter only proved again the difficulty of selling superhero films centered on relatively minor characters, especially when they come from outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with delay, bad buzz, poor reviews and a crowded market working against them.

Still, I think that if examination of the "smaller movies with big profits" and the flops is not very illuminating with respect to the larger picture of the post-pandemic film business the biggest hits do tell us something about the market, especially if we look past the surface. At first glance the movies may seem to affirm the salience of the established blockbuster mode, and with it the skepticism about Hollywood needing to change the way it does things of the kind that 2023 seemed to suggest. After all, not one of the movies was an original film based on an original screenplay, with, excluding the Dune movie (treatable as the second half of a larger story) seven of them actually sequels or prequels (with two of them a "Part 3" and two more of them a "Part 4"). Of those ten films nine (all but It Ends With Us) were science fiction or fantasy spectacles of some type. Five of those nine (counting Mufasa), and one might add the top two (the Inside Out and Moana sequels), were family-oriented animated spectacles, and the live-action movies a retread of a classic space opera, a Marvel superhero film, a stage-to-screen adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, and a video game-based adventure (with a computer-generated protagonist, even if the film is otherwise live-action). The list even seems an affirmation of Disney's dominance of this kind of filmmaking, with the company's movies having a highly disproportionate four of the top ten spots, including the top three (in the Inside Out, Moana and Deadpool sequels).

However, the actual financial data quickly complicates that view. Certainly I was struck by how the figures indicated lower spending on the big animated hits than I thought it they would. Illumination's reputation for efficiency (and the published price tags for the preceding Despicable Me franchise films) may not make the $100 million Despicable Me 4 was made for surprising, but this was still important to the bottom line, while it is worth remarking that Kung Fu Panda was made for half what its predecessors cost, and that if Mufasa was pricey ($200 million) it was still rather cheaper in inflation-adjusted, real, terms than 2019's The Lion King--all of which was even more important to their achieving these their profit margins, given their relatively low grosses compared with those predecessors.* I had a similar impression looking at Deadpool & Wolverine. Granted, that franchise began with a relatively low-budgeted film (as Deadpool's own endless breaking of the fourth wall constantly reminded us), but especially when we consider the charge bill for Marvel's movies in the past, the inflation of recent years, the cost of getting Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman together (a key selling point for the movie), and the film's being a threequel to a series launched by another studio, $200 million is far from extravagant, all as the final bill for "participations" ended up lower than I would have guessed between the series' history, the stars and the final colossal gross. (As the movie approached a Top Gun 2-like gross I had thought the numbers here could be Top Gun 2-like as well. It didn't play out that way in the end.) And so on and so forth, the kind of bank-breakers to which we were previously accustomed just not a presence, as the totals show. After all, gGoing by Deadline's figures, in 2019 the production bill for the ten most profitable films was at least $2 billion (perhaps much more, going by what has been reported about the full bill for the highest-grosser, Avengers: Endgame), which in 2024 dollars would work out to $2.4 billion+. By contrast the top ten films of 2024 cost perhaps $1.4 billion.. Meanwhile the total outlay (counting in distribution, promotion, etc.) was $5.3 billion for the top ten films in 2019, and $6.4 billion when we adjust the figure for 2024 dollars, while the comparable figure for the top ten films of 2024 was a comparatively modest $4.1 billion.

In considering these totals it is only fair to point out that 2024, and particularly the first half of 2024, saw fewer big movies come out than usual due to the delays caused by the Hollywood strike of the prior year (with this only partially compensated by the extent to which big movies slated for release in late 2023, like Dune, Part Two, were bumped over into 2024). Still, the fact that they were such typical blockbusters in franchises that had previously generated top ten-caliber hits, and that so many of them were franchise films with smaller budgets than their predecessors, works against any argument that this was simply a matter of the bar for such success having been lowered. Rather it suggestsif the release slate was thinner than with the fact remains that, as shown before, nine of the top ten were the kinds of movies we expect to be such blockbusters, while when we compare the budgets on those big movies to the cost of not just comparable earlier movies but often immediate predecessors in the same franchise (most obviously in the case of Kung Fu Panda, though as other cases show the trend is more broadly evident) it seems that Hollywood is responding to a tougher market by putting out the same old product, but endeavoring to make it more cheaply so as to lower the threshold for profitability. That

In other words, rather than rising to the challenge by trying to make movies people really want to see, they are staying the course, but pinching their pennies--and to go by some of the comment, cutting corners.

Still, in spite of the studios' predictable resistance to change the top ten do show us that even if they are shoveling the same . . . stuff . . . out to the moviegoer, the moviegoer is not necessarily acting in accordance with their plans, really needing to be excited to get to the theater. In their own ways those two seemingly very different films, Deadpool & Wolverine, and It Ends With Us, offer handy demonstration of this. If some would like to think Deadpool & Wolverine was a "four-quadrant" movie the truth was that it was a case of a movie with a very strong appeal to a particular slice of the audience which flocked to the theaters for a record opening weekend and kept business hopping for weeks afterward, not least because the makers of the film made such a point of giving that target audience what they wanted (to the point of caring more about that than making a movie that was "good" in the conventional sense in the view of some)--while the backers of It Ends With Us similarly aimed for a particular portion of the audience that was very interested in the movie rather than trying to bring in "everyone," and relative to their smaller investment did even better. (Deadpool saw a half billion dollars spent to make a profit of $400 million--whereas It Ends With Us saw a $150 million spent to net $200 million, a return of 130 percent as against the 80 percent on Deadpool.)

Again, as I have been arguing since seeing the data from 2023: rather than looking for returns by putting up the proverbial tentpole and expecting everyone to show up, the studios would do better to make movies for a smaller but really interested share of the audience. As the case of Deadpool shows this does not have to mean original fare, or low budgets, or low (absolute) grosses--but Deadpool would seem a comparative rarity, the more successful efforts more likely to look like an It Ends With Us than a Deadpool. And at this stage of things, with 2025 so far looking much more like 2023 than it does 2024, my guess is that this year, producing a bigger harvest of big-budget flops, will only provide more evidence for that argument--while my guess is also that those who call the shots in Tinseltown will continue to completely ignore that viewargument as they continue to barrage us with sequels and prequels and reboots and remakes no one ever asked for, with the sole difference from what they were doing before their making them in a cut-rate fashion.

* Kung Fu Panda 4 cost $85 million, as against the $185-$195 million the prior three films cost when adjusted for 2024 prices; while Mufasa's $200 million is a lot less than the $260 million, or $320 million in December 2024 terms, spent on The Lion King.