The 2025 Academy Awards: Some Words on the Best Picture Nominees

As those who care to know are likely to already be aware, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 97th annual awards ceremony Sunday night.

At least where the conventionally higher-profile nominees were concerned there were not many surprises--certainly going by the way I have seen these things play out, year in, year out.

I am unsurprised that Anora won, given its buzz (helped by the backlash against the record thirteen prize-nominated Emilia Perez)--and only slightly less unsurprised by its having had a "near-sweep" (emphasis on "near") of the most prestigious prizes. Best Picture and Best Director go together more often than not, while it is more likely than not that the Best Picture winner will also get at least one of the acting prizes, and one of the writing prizes too. (Of the last ten Best Picture winners, six landed Best Director, seven landed at least one acting award, and seven a screenplay Oscar--while every single one of the Best Picture winners chalked up at least one win in the directing, acting or writing categories, and eight of them at least two wins, making for an average of 2.2, leaving Anora just a bit above average with three wins here.)

I am also unsurprised that, as it was a year where no movie was quite the overwhelming presence we see in some years (while we certainly did not see the kind of furor we had last year as the partisans of Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan demanded recognition for each of their films), the rest of the prizes were very widely dispersed, with Anora getting just one more prize, and that in a technical category (Film Editing), as the other four acting and writing prizes (Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay) were spread out among three other Best Picture contenders, namely The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, and Conclave (and A Real Pain with them)--the "spread the wealth" dynamic fairly in evidence here, with the additional recognition accorded them in the technical categories consistent with that. (Brutalist and Emilia Perez each got a second award for their music--the former for original score, the latter for the song "El Mal"--while The Substance, if missing out on the Best Actress prize for which Demi Moore was supposedly a lock, got only a hair and makeup award.)

At the same time I am unsurprised that Part Two of Dune was limited to the technical categories, and that Dune and Part One of Wicked each picked up a mere two prizes (especially as Wicked's being a faithful, no-additional-songs adaptation of the Broadway original ruled it out of the more musically-oriented categories, and especially as Wicked is just a "Part One" and so unlike the other contenders will have a chance at greater recognition in the 2026 ceremony, should the second half of the film be well-received, an expectation for which there is some precedent).

I am also not surprised that, if no movie claimed a really big share of the prizes, the result was still that the makers of two Best Picture nominees, including A Complete Unknown (which, a natural for an Oscar as a biopic of a famed singer, had among its eight nominations one for Timothée "Are You Sick of Hearing About Him Yet?" Chalamet), walked away from the ceremony without a single statue--for simple mathematics makes clear how hard it is to give everyone something when ten Best Picture nominees are now the norm, and there are only seventeen prizes to go around for any U.S.-made live-action feature film (the rest recognizing animated, short, documentary and foreign work), as a result of which their backers will have to settle for promoting their movies as "Oscar nominees" rather than "Oscar winners" (while Best Picture nominee I'm Still Here had its sole win the International Feature Film category).

And it is equally unsurprising that in a year in which filmgoing was down even by post-pandemic standards and excitement about the cinematic releases weak, and what eventually proved to be the leading contenders for the bigger prizes got limited attention from the wider audience (even A Complete Unknown grossed a mere $73 million, as the five that claimed eleven of the prizes, including all the more prestigious prizes, picked up much less--Anora, The Brutalist and Emilia Perez grossing just $15 million each, A Real Pain half that, and the whole lot under $90 million) the evidences of the interest of the general public in the ceremony were not very high. If viewership was higher than in the (understandably) rock-bottom year of 2021, it fell for the first time in four years.

Indeed, considering these numbers the Julius Streichers over at the New York Times wondered aloud if the numbers did not bespeak the cultural "irrelevance" of the ceremony.

Admittedly I have myself been arguing for the declining "relevance" of the ceremony for years now, but what the NYT offered was not an assessment of the ways in which popular culture and the standing of film in it have evolved, but rather their starting point for an argument that "as the country veered right" the perceived progressive content of the more substantial nominees was out of touch with the sentiment of the folks who live outside "the Hollywood bubble." An exercise in what those schooled in "logical fallacies" call "begging the question," it is entirely clear from the Times' predictably taking that line that they mean for their readers to think so--continuing in their relentlessly pushing the view that the rest of the country has no truck with Hollywood liberalism (remember their part in spinning the story of Twisters' release?), and especially that the outcome of the presidential election of 2024 was not a matter of profound material and especially economic discontents, staggering incompetence (or indifference) on the part of a Democratic Party that, utterly terrified of anything that might press its platform in a progressive direction, put itself in an exceedingly difficult situation through the decisions that led to its changing candidates so late in the race, and the lack of alternatives for the protest-minded that those so committed to forcing a "Hold your nose and vote"-type of politics on the public approve so heartily, but instead an expression of deep shifts in the views of the public that made November 2024 a turning point in der kulturkampf, on the flames of which they stand ever ready to pour gasoline--and point to as justification for their own rightward march.

The Cost of Living: What We Really Pay for Housing

Jedidajah Otte's recent article about the supposed "dream" of home ownership having turned into a nightmare for a great many Americans is worthy of notice for a number of reasons. One is that, in contrast with much of the coverage of this subject, it acknowledges that rather than the "pride of ownership" or the security that is supposed to come with owning the four walls and roof within which they reside, the problems of renters in a time of scarcity and spiking prices (and zero acknowledgment from anyone in a position of authority that humans might have need of affordable rentals) have constituted a significant "push" factor in this direction. Another is that in considering the troubles of homeowners Otte discusses not only the high sale price of homes, but also the high cost of continuing to live in a home even after one owns it "free and clear"--the cost of taxes, insurance and maintenance.

The last in particular is testimony to the fact that not only has housing been made difficult to attain by an economy running on real estate speculation turbo-charged by casinonomics-minded ultra-loose monetary policy, and policymakers' matching their obsequiousness toward all those who benefit from that game with contempt for the public's housing needs (indeed, they invariably hasten to blame "irresponsible" homeowners for any problems they have, the better to deflect any criticism of the Finance-Insurance-Real Estate sector), but the decrepit or obscenely high-maintenance character of the housing built and sold to the public. Making it no accident that your spam box may be full of unsolicited offers regarding the roof you may or may not have, the product, in contrast to the traditional logic and justification of economic growth and the exactions it demands as being for the sake of making necessities cheaper and more abundant, is all too consistent with the now century-old consumer culture designed to force people to consume as much as possible by making meeting basic needs as expensive an affair as possible, turning home ownership into one unending "renovation" of a money pit while glorifying the situation as "choice," and attributing any failure of the product or absence of potential improvement to consumer tastes. (Home buyers, they tell us, go for cheapness rather than solidity in their homes, and then at the same time they tell us that it's the consumer and not the builder who resists price-cutting "manufactured" house-building. Sure, no contradiction there.)

The next time some techno-hyped nitwit gives you the spiel about surging technological change making our lives better every day, remind them of what they are paying for shelter.

And food.

And health care.

Captain America 4's (First) and Second Weekend--and the Revelations About "the Budget": Some Thoughts

As of the time of this writing we have seen the box office gross for Captain America in not just the first but the second weekend of its release. The movie's opening was within the range of common expectation, but unspectacular--some $89 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period, and then $100 million when we added in the subsequent Monday.

Compare that to what Ant-Man 3 took in on the first three days of its release, and the four day weekend as a whole exactly two years earlier--some $106 million over the first three days, and $120 million over the first four. Adjusting for inflation Captain America's grosses were, for both periods, down about a fifth from what that movie did, with all that means for the film up to that point, even though one would conventionally expect more people to come out for Captain America than for Scott Lang.

However, an opening weekend tells us only so much. Even a weak opening may be redeemed by good week-to-week holds--and this was where Ant-Man 3 really suffered. The movie's gross fell 70 percent from the first weekend to the second--a number generally recognized as terrible, and which did indeed prove a sign of things to come, with the movie ultimately barely doubling the gross of its first three days over its entire run (instead of multiplying it by two-and-a-half or even three times in the way so many Marvel movies have done).

And as it happened, in spite of a less than wholly enthusiastic audience response there was some expectation that Captain America 4 would do better, with the folks at Boxoffice Pro anticipating a drop of just 50-60 percent, and in the process a gross of $37-$44 million.

Alas, the sub-Ant Man 3 gross has been followed by a weekend-on-weekend fall in the take about as bad as Ant-Man's, the current report of a $28 million gross working out to a 68 percent fall. It also works out to a ten day take of $141 million--which, again, is about a fifth lower than Ant-Man's inflation-adjusted ten day gross (the $177 million its $167 million would be in today's dollars).

It therefore does not seem unreasonable to anticipate Captain America following an Ant-Man 3-like trajectory from an initial take lower than Ant-Man's, leaving the movie one-fifth down from Ant-Man's final gross. Some $225-$230 million in today's terms, think a finish for Captain America in the North American market of about $180 million. Even should the film do a little better--should it, by grace of better holds, prove to have Guardians of the Galaxy 2-like legs, for example--it would still only match Ant-Man 3, not best it. Meanwhile there seems little chance of rescue by the international market, which may not do more than match the North American gross.

The result is that the gross of $400-$500 million, which I suggested as the likely range for the film's global gross last month, seems eminently plausible.

Still, in considering the consequences of the movie's gross for Marvel's bottom line, one should note that even as these have fallen so has the report of the film's budget (?!). In 2024 the press for the film held that the budget for the production (the actual making of the movie) was $350 million, or even more, which was what I went with in my initial discussion of the film. In late January, however, it became commonplace to say that this was a gross overstatement, that the film really cost just a little over half that, some $180 million--a claim that profoundly changes the possibility of the movie turning a profit, or at least getting to the break-even point, if true. But is it? Most of the press has passed on the word uncritically. However, some are skeptical (World of Reel's Jordan Ruimy, citing the authoritative reports of Joanna Robinson and Dave Gonzalez, calls the lower figure "too silly to believe"), while the imprecision of the discussion leaves at least some room for reconciling the different figures. (For example, consider the distinction drawn by Deadline where it presents "production" and "interest and overhead" on separate lines, even though the latter are undeniably part of the bill, all as it is far from impossible that an initially intended $180 million production's cost exploded during the much-talked about reshoots.) Moreover, Marvel has had a history of flat-out underreporting its outlays for movies, and then having the facts given away by, for example, the documentation entailed in its claiming government subsidy for the production (as seen on many occasions when it held out its hand for a rebate from the United Kingdom). Perhaps we will see such a revelation down the road in the case of this film, perhaps not, and should it really prove to be a $180 million movie, and the backers not spent too much on promotion and the rest, the movie would still have some chance of at least breaking even with the help of the post-theatrical revenue streams.

Whether the gross is very promising for the subsequent Marvel movies lining up for their chance at the box office, however, is another matter entirely.

What the YR4 Drama Tells us About Techno-Hype

The past several weeks have seen the danger posed to Earth by Near Earth Objects return to the news in connection with what, for a short time, seemed the exceptional level of risk posed by the asteroid YR4 (scientists briefly estimating an unprecedented 3 percent chance of the possibly "city-killing" object hitting Earth in 2032, which they have since recalculated as a much, much smaller 0.0005 percent chance).

I suspect that most of the public will forget all about YR4 in a short period of time, as the whole issue it represents passes out of its mind. Still, the prospect of a real threat was sufficiently well-publicized that some asked what could be done were the threat of a collision with such an object to prove genuine--and got an answer I suspect many found disappointing, namely "Not much." The reason was that the successful execution of such a mission might require as much as a decade's lead time, and an impact in 2032 meant that the "window of opportunity" might already have closed.

As is commonly the case when the "experts" tell the public that a very desirable thing cannot be done it seemed that the misanthropes and pseudo-intellectual snobs who people the web's fora had a big laugh at the expense of those who simply do not appreciate the complicated, exacting and unforgiving nature of such a mission, while sneering at those who get their notions about technical feasibility from Michael Bay movies (perhaps the more in as the was not exactly new information).

Still, it seems to me that those disappointed to learn this have better grounds for thinking so than the mockery would suggest. After all, the threat is one that has been well-known to the public for decades. They are told of the existence of "Space Forces," and even agencies devoted to planetary defense specifically. They are well aware that their governments, whose spokespersons endlessly tell them "There's no money" for anything that might improve their daily lives as they inflict austerity without cease upon them, officially spend well over $2 trillion a year on what is (usually euphemistically) called defense, and less officially much more, with much of the money going to programs that seem relevant--as they are devoted to watching the sky, putting things into space, making big bangs. And of course, they are always being told about "INNOVATION!" which will "CHANGE EVERYTHING!" After all, consider the miracles of space access and space development people were told "Newspace" would accomplish simply because the "entrepreneurs" that the George Gilders treat as God on Earth were now on the job.

On the basis of all that one is not entirely unreasonable to expect that with all that the capacity to protect the Earth against existential risks of this nature might at least be making greater strides than has been seen to date--and indeed to see in the "actually existing" level of planetary defense capability something not only disappointing, or worrying, but an indictment of the status quo in a way that makes worthwhile another mention of disaster movies like Armageddon. It is certainly true that such works have misled the public by giving them the impression that our technology is far more advanced than it really is, our means for generating needed new technologies more swiftly responsive than they really are, and above all the willingness or ability of "entrepreneurs" to "make it happen." (Contrary to the NewSpace fantasy so dear to a particular kind of strident web-permeating ideologue, what business, and government, have, in spite of a few interesting developments, like rockets that land themselves on their launch pads Golden Age sci-fi-style, mostly they have been retreading old ground, and even looking to reconstruct capabilities that we had a half century ago, exemplary of which is the struggle to build a new booster merely matching the lift capability of the Saturn V!) However, there is still a worse way in which such depictions have misled them, namely in making them think that the officialdom which oversees their lives consists of essentially intelligent, conscientious people sufficiently earnest about keeping the world in one piece that they can be counted on to rise to the challenge when presented with such a crisis. As government response to climate change, pandemics and much, much else shows--not least, the problem of planetary defense--that image could not possibly be further from the reality.

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey Movie: A Few Thoughts

After the commercial (and critical) triumph that Christopher Nolan enjoyed with Oppenheimer, which was as colossal as it was unlikely-seeming, there was quite some buzz about what project Nolan would take up next.

I suspect few expected that the next Nolan movie would be an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey--the actual production of which has been confirmed by a much-publicized "first look" this past week.

Frankly I'm a bit disappointed by the revelation. With Oppenheimer Nolan used a weight that very few artists within Hollywood have to make a very serious movie about serious subjects (Big Science, nuclear war, the Anti-Communist hysteria and political persecution of the Cold War period) in a way we don't see much these days, in part because any noticing that there is such a thing as society and that it may not be perfect is so little tolerated--and one might have hoped that he would use his even stronger position after making the movie to do so again.

However, if at this point so little has been said about the Odyssey movie that the interested have little to do but discuss Matt Damon's anachronistic-looking helmet, in choosing to make this particular movie Nolan can seem to be turning away from that kind of challenge, perhaps retreating into the "safer" territory he has so long occupied, of myth and psycho-babble (we got plenty of that with Batman, and Inception), and history-as-spectacle, Ridley Scott-style (such as we had with Dunkirk).

For the record I hope to be wrong about that.

Should There Even be a Bond 26?

For many years what has passed for "news" about the James Bond franchise in the entertainment press has been a mix of stale gossip, banal commentary (what somebody you never heard of thinks they should do with the next Bond film), and baseless speculations about what the next movie may be like--keeping "James Bond" in the public consciousness with clickbaity pseudo-news obscuring the fact that the franchise has been effectively moribund for many years now.

However, February 2025 did bring a genuine piece of news about the franchise, namely that "creative control" of the Everything or Nothing film series (which, excluding such marginal oddities as the eventually MST3K'ed Operation Kid Brother , made all the Bond feature films save for Charles K. Feldman's spoof Casino Royale and Jack Schwartzman's Thunderball remake Never Say Never Again) has passed from the Broccoli film series, where it has been since the series began, to Amazon.

What I have seen of the coverage of the event from the more established quarters of that press reports the fact rather than opinionates about it--perhaps not unreasonably, given that nothing has been said of just what Amazon would be likely to do with that control. Yet, as anyone with any brain function whatsoever would guess, much of the attentive part of the public have been less than delighted with the news, with, indeed, the web quickly becoming awash in recollections of Amazon's thus far highly divisive handling of the Rings of Power series as they make cracks about the James Bond franchise being treated in the same manner. ("Here comes the 'James Bond universe!" for instance, goes one of the less offensive variations on the theme.)

However, the fact of the passing of creative control from one group to another seems to me secondary next to the more fundamental fact that there is really nowhere left to go with the James Bond franchise, which has become superfluous in the pop cultural landscape of today in the way that such creations inevitably do. Once again, from the standpoint of pop cultural history James Bond mattered for two reasons, namely that

1. James Bond does not represent the invention of the fictional spy as "international man of mystery," but rather was an update of the Duckworth Drew-Bulldog Drummond tradition of such espionage adventure for a new generation. Ian Fleming brought the then half century old and fairly shopworn type into the world of the 1950s, while the film series gave him a makeover for the 1960s (and one might add, that made it salable to a far, far broader audience than the one Fleming aimed for when he sat down to write Casino Royale). Thus does that type of character and his associated adventures remain familiar to us today.

2. In providing that update the film series also did much to shape, if not invent, the action movie, and action-adventure franchise, as we know it. Indeed, if most people think of "James Bond" and think "spy," what really made the films about this spy stand so tall at the box office over his predecessors, contemporaries and imitators was that moviegoers thought "James Bond" and thought "action," the films offering a kind and scale of action-adventure spectacle that Hollywood would not even show any understanding of until Star Wars, or seriously compete with until the 1980s.

Both of those contributions are undeniably significant, but the series made them over a half century in the past at this point, as what was unique to the Bond series has become commonplace. After all, not only are we positively saturated in action movies now, but in the '90s Hollywood began cranking out big-budget action-adventures starring spies specifically, with considerable box office success, as seen in the familiarity of Jack Ryan, Harry Tasker, Ethan Hunt, Jason Bourne, Xander Cage, Dom Toretto and company, and Nick Fury and the rest of the Marvel universe's many secret agents to moviegoers. Since then the continuation of the series has sold tickets on the strength of the "brand name" the series established in its earlier day, viewers' nostalgia for the more memorable moments that have only grown rarer with the years, those occasions when it engaged fans with a more successful reuse of its well-known elements, and the continuous update of the surface gloss in a way that has seen the series-runners following rather than leading the way they did in their heyday (already evident in 1973's Live and Let Die's use of "blaxploitation"). Indeed, on many an occasion the film series has in its imitativeness often seemed to be on the verge of losing everything that gave it any distinction at all (as with 1989's Licence to Kill, which looked and felt like a standard "Someone Killed My Favorite Second Cousin" '80s action movie down to the extra-brutal violence that earned the first cut an R rating, and less popular as this view may be, the ballyhooed reboot of the twenty-first century).

If one accepts that then the right thing to do would be to grant that the series has had a good run and gracefully set it aside--but that, of course, is not how movieland works. The vulgar Dauriats, after all, are in even more complete command of the world of the world than they are the world of publishing, where, as Balzac wrote, the monument a writer "reared with . . . life-blood" is nothing more than "a good or a bad speculation" for a businessman concerned only with how much money he can make, how quickly, with as little effort or risk as possible--all as, alas, the businessmen in question are not necessarily very good at even that.

As it happens the state of the market is not very attractive to anyone seriously thinking about putting out a new Bond film. The reality is that if the biggest blockbusters make as much as ever they did the reduced level of moviegoing compared with even a half decade ago means that with only so many ticket sales to go round there are more flops--with the record in 2023 very instructive here, 2024 less striking that way mainly because the release slate was so thin that year, and 2025 looking very much as if it could be a repeat of 2023 (with the weak January already behind us, and the luke-warm reception of Captain America 4, only affirming such a reading of the situation). Moreover, the Hollywood spy movie boom that began in the '90s gives every impression of unraveling as the latest Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious films underperform, just as the last Bond movie did--North American audiences, certainly, not having much time for No Time to Die, the weakest performer in that market since 1989's flop Licence to Kill, with, especially worrying here, the analysis of the demographics of those who did buy tickets leaving ever less doubt that the Bond franchise was surviving on the interest of an aging fan base, the young scarcely aware and even less interested.

Indeed, all this has likely played its role in delaying the franchise's continuation to date. Still, where a franchise has been successful in the past studio executives are very reluctant to give it up, so much so that they have to lose a lot of money, and that maybe more than once, before they so much as let a franchise lie fallow after a while--and if its real glory days are far behind it no franchise has been as successful for as long as the Bond films. At the same time this tendency reinforced by the fact that never have such decision-makers been so flattered by their courtiers, with the predictable result the increase of their stupidity and arrogance; that so many have been prepared to grade the performance of movies at the box office on a curve, and indeed pass off money-losing flops as great hits; and that there is such an unprecedented hostility to taking chances on new material, and still more, revising the model for pursuing cinematic success in the way that the tightened market and exhaustion of old formulas seems to demand. The result is that, even if we do not see another Bond movie for many, many more years, there is no chance of those who call the shots gracefully letting 007 go.

The Prospect of a Sixth Jason Bourne Movie

I was surprised to hear of plans for a "Jason Bourne 6" some time ago.

Little has been heard of the project for some time, and it may be that the movie is at this point stuck in development hell. But that there had been any seriousness about the project is in itself surprising--at least, if one overlooks the extreme franchise addiction of the studio executives.

After all, it has been almost a quarter of a century since the first Jason Bourne film, and now nearly a decade since the last entry in the series, 2016's Jason Bourne--all as the franchise hit its commercial peak with the third film way back in 2007 with The Bourne Ultimatum (not incidentally, also the logical ending of the series), with all that implies for the franchise's vitality and cachet. Indeed, at this point it is common for a series' runners to be thinking "reboot" rather than "sequel," and that the producers have not gone that course due to the fact that the attempt at a reboot they already made with the fourth film (again, because number three was the logical ending) failed, making the executives hasten to get Matt Damon back into the series, with, again, what that implies about the shakiness of the series' standing.

However, as if this were not enough there is the reality that in the significantly contracted post-pandemic franchise action movies are offering more risk and less return than they used to do, and the Bourne movies are not particularly strong contenders here. At the box office they were respectable earners, not spectacular earners, Bourne Ultimatum taking in a mere $443 million, not quite $700 million in January 2025 dollars, and the last film, Jason Bourne, with a gross of $550 million in today's terms (such that it did not make Deadline's list of the year's top twenty profit-makers), leaving the margins less impressive than they might be. Meanwhile the boom in Hollywood spy-fi that got underway in the '90s seems to have run its course--for the last entries in the James Bond, Mission: Impossible and Fast and Furious franchises have all underperformed so badly as to give the impression of those franchises sputtering out altogether, and the Jack Ryan franchise spared that fate mainly by its having shifted to the small screen as a Netflix series years earlier (after, again, another underperformance by the 2015 film that represented a third reboot for the series).

The result is that a Bourne 6 is a very, very big gamble today. That doesn't mean that it won't happen--after all, Gladiator 2 happened (and went on to validate the predictions of the skeptics)--but the road to an actual film is likely to be long and rocky at best, the receipts disappointing, and if on a more modest scale than Gladiator 2, the result altogether a reminder that the fact that studio executives keep making losing bets on such films has absolutely nothing to do with the executives being slaves to consumer demand.

The Upcoming The Madalorian & Grogu: Thoughts

It seems that after many, many false starts Disney-Lucasfilm will finally be getting a new Star Wars film into theaters in May 2026--six and a half years after the last Star Wars movie (The Rise of Skywalker), and almost exactly eight years after the last really comparable movie, the side story Solo.

Not much is known about the movie, bar its being an obvious extension of the flagship TV series of the now rather sprawling small screen side of the franchise. Still, one thing about it caught my eye, namely the budget: $120 million. By no means low, it is also far from bank-busting for a Star Wars feature film, with Solo again a useful point of comparison. That film cost $250 million to produce back in 2018--about the equivalent of $315 million in today's money after we adjust for inflation. The Mandalorian film is thus running Disney a rough third of what the earlier movie did in real terms, with the more limited nature of the investment (likely to be complemented by a lower outlay for publicity) seeming to me relevant given the way the film market is going. Rather than putting up a tentpole and expecting "everyone" to show up for it, Disney may be aiming for the more limited portion of the audience that they might hope would really care about a Mandalorian movie--the project a limited investment for a limited but relatively enthusiastic market just big enough to let them turn a profit on a "low" budget. If so then whatever the film ultimately proves to be artistically, there is at least some soundness to the logic, this seeming to me exactly how movie producers need to play the game much more often if they are to keep making money at it.

What Does the Release Slate for 2026 Say About How Hollywood is Handling its Crisis?

As of February 2025 the release slate for 2026 is far from complete. Still, anyone who might have thought that the shrinking market for theatrically released films and the signs that audiences have been getting fed up with Hollywood retreads of the same old franchises would nudge the studios in a different direction (I put in my two cents about what I think they need to be doing simply from a bottom-line perspective) will be quickly disabused of such expectations looking at the expected offerings for that year as reported by the relevant Wikipedia page (one page I have found a reliable guide in the past).

It is, after all, a year chock-full of movies in the same genres, from the same franchises. Yes, we have superheroes--with at least three Marvel movies not counting the fourth Spider-Man film, and three movies coming our way from DC Studios--along with a Star Wars movie, a Mummy movie, more Jumanji and Hunger Games, and another crack at the Street Fighter franchise. There is also animation of the familiar types aplenty, with Minions 3, Ice Age 6, Shrek 5, Toy Story 5, and of course, Super Mario 2, as well as a feature-length animated Cat in the Hat, and an animated-to-live-action remake of Moana to boot (less than two years after Moana 2!) due out. And of course, what does not belong to the big action movies and animated extravaganzas is substantially accounted for as horror also from the same franchises, including 28 Days Later, Scream, Exorcist and Insidious, and more parody of the same from the Scary Movie series.

If there is any possibility of adaptation on the part of the studios' behavior it would seem to lie not in the kinds of movies they make, which reflect their addiction to their long-established (if ever less reliable) model for generating blockbusters, but the management of the individual projects. While the publicly released data seems spotty, I get the impression that the studios, if still "big spenders" rather than "wise spenders" (to turn about a phrase of Tony Blair's), may be getting a little more careful with their money, if not with their expenditure on productions then at least their expenditures on promotion and the rest. (Indeed, looking at Deadline's numbers last year, if it was undeniably the case that the year was packed with flops, the numbers for films like Indiana Jones 5 and The Flash and Captain Marvel 2 not quite so bad as I thought they might be given the dismal grosses.) All the same, in finding their savings where they can as they stay an increasingly dubious course they may, especially as 2025, and now 2026, are shaping up to look like 2023, prove to be "penny wise but pound foolish."

Remembering Barb Wire

With the Pamela Anderson film The Last Showgirl recently getting critical claim, and even Oscar buzz (but alas, no actual nominations) it seems a more than usually opportune time to remember her shot at the cinematic big time way back in 1996--Barb Wire.

As one might guess from how long ago that was, and how she hasn't exactly been in a lot of movies since, the film was a flop on its release in May 1996, just before the start of the summer movie season that gave us the original Twister, Independence Day and the first Mission: Impossible movie. Still, Barb Wire did become a cult hit in time, and it is not hard to see why. Even at the time Roger Ebert, in his far from rave review, acknowledged the film's "high energy level, and . . . sense of deranged fun," and how it bespoke just how much effort and craft the makers really did put into a comparatively low-budgeted ($9 million) B-movie that made for a rather more than passable piece of sci-fi action, assembled efficiently and tightly and with some flair.

Today the movie also has an interest as the kind of superhero film we used to get much more often then than now, and not just its efficiency and briskness compared with today's lumbering spectacles costing orders of magnitude as much. There is, too, its utilizing material drawn from outside the DC and Marvel A-lists, and indeed from outside DC and Marvel altogether (Barb Wire is a Dark Horse comics character, brought to you by the folks who also gave us The Rocketeer, and The Mask), the movie's being thoroughly R-rated (and not just for the copious violence, profanity and ribald humor)--and at the same time its being jokey and "meta" enough that I imagine many of those who really remember the movies of the '90s wonder at the fuss over Deadpool. After all, would you believe that for the plot we get a gender-switched pastiche of Casablanca in which Pamela is in the role of Rick, and Bobba Fett is in the position of Ilsa in a Kickpuncher-ish version of the then distant-seeming date of 2017?