Is a Debt of Honor Movie Really a Good Idea? Considering the Clancy Brand Name

In considering the idea of a Debt of Honor movie from a commercial point of view one might as well start with the brand Hollywood is cashing in on with its Ryanverse products--the Tom Clancy name.

That name's heyday, clearly, was the '80s, when Tom Clancy was the highest-selling American novelist of his decade, with two of his novels the bestselling book of the year in two consecutive years (The Cardinal of the Kremlin in 1988, Clear and Present Danger in 1989), and the second of them the bestselling novel of the whole decade, while his star was only slightly dimmed during the '90s. However, that changed pretty quickly after the turn of the century--after which Clancy's output, which was the more prolific for the then-vast output of other "co-authored" books, fiction and nonfiction that he produced, halted in the early years of the next century (with the last of the original run 2003's The Teeth of the Tiger).

Of course, the Ryan books continue with the help of co-authors Grant Blackwood, Mark Greaney, Peter Telep, and others, and they seem to have had their audience. (You can find them on the paperback rack at the supermarket or in the convenience store.) Still, that leaves them a long way from the peak of Clancy's bestsellerdom--perhaps just another franchise on auto-pilot cashing in on the readiness of a dwindling base of fans left over from the boom times to have the same old stuff served up for them one more time. After all, the audience for print action thrillers collapsed in the '90s--the paperback Mack Bolan-type adventures, the hardback Robert Ludlum-style shoot 'em ups, and certainly the military techno-thrillers that from the start were hugely atypical for popular fiction in a way that likely contributed to their especially sharp decline. (In spite of the pieties that people who never write a word love to spout about "good fiction" being character fiction first, last and always, character, Character, CHARACTER! until it is coming out of your ears, most of the stuff on the racks is not really strong on character, as either subject or driver of events. But it does tend to at least focus on a character as it presents an easy-to-follow read, whereas techno-thrillers like Clancy's were so often sprawling, big-picture stuff, full of subplots and minor viewpoint characters there just to show some key bit of the action, and in a "Jack Ryan" novel Ryan himself is apt to get lost from view for long stretches amid all that. Indeed, I could add that the books could often be a "slow burn" in their long build-ups, were prone to be information-heavy, and often quite impersonal and dry for many tastes.)

All this seems the more the case given that it does not seem that many are picking up the older Clancy novels these days. On Goodreads, it seems, Debt of Honor has 47,000 ratings--given prior use of the site to assess these things, about what I would expect for a bestseller of that time that no one picks up much in the Internet era. Which, again, is what I would expect even if the genre did not suffer such a decline, simply because the half-life of popular fiction tends to be so short, with, again, thriller fiction of all kinds particularly suffering. (For example, how many read Robert Ludlum today--especially anything but The Bourne Identity because they saw the movies? From what I can tell, very few indeed.)

Of course, if the print Ryanverse has to all evidences seen its star fall a long way the franchise continues to exist in other media. The films made from Clancy's books were generally judged hits--but how has interest in them held up? It does not seem unfair to say that Alec Baldwin was deemed dispensable after The Hunt for Red October, and that Harrison Ford's Jack Ryan is a long way from Han Solo or Indiana Jones in cultural cachet. Moreover, since The Sum of All Fears in 2002, after which no one saw fit to give Ben Affleck another "go" at the character, we have had two decades in which we have seen only two major feature films based on Clancy's work, namely 2015's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (which ended up a lower-budgeted January dump month release), and 2021's Without Remorse (which went straight to streaming amid the pandemic). In spite of having cast relatively well-liked leads (Chris Pine isn't usually regarded as the worst Chris, and the press usually loves Michael B. Jordan), they do not seem to have been hits, or left much impression, all as Jack Ryan was relegated to the small screen (and is now played by that guy from The Office who always stared at the camera with that insufferably smug expression on his face). The show has presumably done fairly well there, but all the same it is not a shift of that incarnation of the character from the small screen to the big they are talking about--just as they are not trying to capitalize on the strength of the Clancy name where it may be most prominent, gaming, as they might have with a Ghost Recon or Splinter Cell movie, but, apparently, resurrecting Ford's 90s-era Ryan.

The result is that Ford, more than Clancy, is the name of importance here--the wisdom of which decision remains to be seen. People may still be up for seeing Ford play Indiana Jones, if only out of nostalgia--this, in fact, seems to me one of the few things that Indiana Jones 5 has in its favor--but Ford is less closely identified with Ryan than that figure, that draw just not nearly as strong. Moreover, even with Jones we will see it tested when Dial of Destiny hits theaters this June. Should that movie not do so well as hoped--and it seems to me that between the colossal budget and the many strikes against it there is a good chance it will be seen as less than a roaring success--we may see Hollywood's enthusiasm for this project cool off in a hurry.

Why Are We Now Hearing About Harrison Ford Playing Jack Ryan Again in a Film Version of Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor?

Giant Freakin Robot recently reported that there are now plans to bring Harrison Ford's version of Jack Ryan back to the big screen in a film adaptation of Tom Clancy's 1994 bestseller Debt of Honor.

Let us for the moment accept the claim at face value--that there is at least for the moment a really serious interest in getting the film made rather than this just being a rumor. This would seem to me to bespeak three aspects of the situation in Hollywood as it stands.

1. Hollywood has been facing some desperate times lately, with the pandemic's battering of moviegoing, the idiotic expenditures on streaming far beyond anything justified by its financial prospects, and the faltering of so many of those huge franchises on which it has counted to pay the bills (Disney's Star Wars franchise stalling out, with the MCU showing signs of going the same way, Warner Bros. troubles with Fantastic Beasts and the DCEU, etc., etc.). One option was to get creative. The other was to do more of what was already not working. And Hollywood predictably did the latter, its inability to let any franchise alone gone into overdrive--such that even with a Jack Ryan series currently a hit on Amazon (with its fourth season not yet even aired!) they are already talking about reverting to an earlier part of the franchise history by (apparently) continuing from the movies of the '90s.

2. Top Gun 2 has made a big impression on Hollywood--and it would be unlikely that this has not driven some to attempt imitation, the more in as so many are sure that Top Gun 2's extreme overperformance was testament to nothing but the attractions of the film itself, even if not everyone agreed on what exactly in it worked the magic.* Clearly some interpreted it as evidence of an audience for more exploitation of the '80s nostalgia that a little while ago seemed on its way out. Still others have interpreted it as indicative of an unmet appetite for jingoistic military adventure. And some have even seen it as a reaffirmation of the old-fashioned star vehicle. A Jack Ryan movie starring Harrison Ford (who is Persona Non Grata in China anyway, so no loss there) could seem consistent with all that, the more in as

3. Harrison Ford's stock would seem to be way up in 2023 as a result of his recent string of roles--his appearing on TV in the prequel to the hit show Yellowstone (1923), his having another Indiana Jones movie on the way, and his joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the new General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross. All this would seem plenty to have the executives looking back at his very, very long list of credits and saying "What can we make sequels to?" Alas, Ford's Han Solo was killed in The Force Awakens, and Disney, of course, is already going with more Indiana Jones. Rick Deckard's second adventure didn't fly (and should not have been expected to as Blade Runner was a cult, not a mass audience, success, and did not even have the makings for the mass audience success it never became), so a third was out for the time being. That left the Jack Ryan character as the next most plausible candidate. With most of the early Ryan stories having been already adapted (everything prior to Debt of Honor in the sequence save for the already development hell-consigned Cardinal of the Kremlin, and the later, retro, choice of Red Rabbit unlikely for many reasons) and not exactly crying out for a remake, while the others Clancy wrote are not easily picked up without Debt of Honor's backstory (Executive Orders, The Bear and the Dragon), Debt of Honor was the one they went for, while I think they were attracted to the idea of a movie where Ford plays a President. After all, they had already seen him do so in the itself fairly Tom Clancy-ish Air Force One, which itself may, due to the same "thinking" discussing here, have already been marked for a sequel; while it seems Ford's MCU character Ross will be, at this stage of things, President as well. So why not the Jack Ryan book where Ryan becomes President too? So that they could have three simultaneously running franchises where Harrison Ford is President of the United States?

Yes, it sounds stupid, but then Hollywood is stupid, so there you go. The only question is whether the stupidity in question will or will not prove costly in this case--a subject for another post.

* For my part it has seemed to me very, very important that Top Gun 2 had the media cheerleading for it from the start in a way rarely seen for any movie (with the critics giving a movie that was basically a do-over of a flick they gave a crummy 57 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes a fantastic 97 percent score this time around); and that it faced much less competition than most summer blockbusters due to the small number and comparative weaknesses of the other big movies on offer (Dr. Strange 2, the closing installment of the Jurassic World trilogy, Thor, all it had to contend with). However, it is very clear that the commentariat has no desire to acknowledge any of that.

The Death of the Mid-Range Movie and What it Meant for a Star Wars Expanded Universe On Screen

This Memorial Day it will be five years since the release of Solo--the Star Wars film offering the story of the "making of" the iconic character.

The film, of course, was a financial catastrophe for Disney--with a production budget approaching $300 million implying the necessity of billion dollar-plus success, and the movie not quite making it to $400 million.

Interestingly audiences did not hate the film. Its Rotten Tomatoes' score of 63 percent is not spectacular, but not terrible, either, and actually better than what some other, higher-grossing, Star Wars movies got.* Instead of the movie being particularly poor what strikes me is that a Solo prequel is simply not the sort of story of which billion dollar hits are made. Rather than the cosmic-galactic good vs. evil, Jedi vs. Sith, Rebels vs. Empire struggles of Episodes I-IX it offered a smaller-scale, more personal story--a piece of space noir fit for the Expanded Universe, and the smaller, more hardcore audience that would have been up for it, rather than the main line epics that bring in the wider audience.

Matching the scale of the production to potential audience would have called for a mid-range movie that would have been a hit on mid-range terms, but that was out of the question, the mid-range pretty much squeezed out of theaters--while making mid-range Star Wars movies could have seemed to run the risk of making the bigger franchise look "mid-range." But the studio's "leadership" were insistent on taking such a tack as they tried to convert Star Wars into a Marvel-style hit machine--and predictably failed in a way that significantly contributed to their bigger effort stalling out. Indeed, five years on the sole Star Wars movie to make it to the screen was the close of the then-already troubled main line trilogy, while Star Wars has been relegated to the small screen--series' for the streaming service. It is not so easy to judge how Lucasfilm has done in the medium as it would be to judge by the grosses of theatrical releases, but the fact that the studio is telling the company to prioritize its Star Wars series' even as it generally retreats from other content (even canceling an Indiana Jones show, it seems) suggests it has found something worth sticking with here--a streaming equivalent of the Arrowverse that is an easier object than a theatrical equivalent of the MCU.

* The score for The Last Jedi stands at a very weak 42 percent--and if one chalks it up to "trolls" it is unclear why they held off attacking Solo so brutally when they seem to have turned against the franchise and the studio as a whole.

Will Disney Lose Money on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny?

The reported cost of producing Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in the $300 million range--and in the absence of specific information about product placement, subsidies, etc., I am going to go with that as the starting point.

Going by the rule of thumb that a movie breaking even on the theatrical run (not on the movie, with all its added revenue streams, some of which may have already kicked in--e.g. the sell-off of various rights, but just the theatrical run) may require up to five times its production budget some $1.5 billion may be required in the most pessimistic scenario.

My guess as to the film's earnings prospects are that, should it perform in line with the prior Indiana Jones films (granted, this is less certain given that it has been fifteen change-filled years) we could expect it to take in about $400 million domestic and $600 million internationally for a billion dollar total--with a 25 percent margin of error and the movie's falling below the mark more likely than its overshooting it. The result is $1.25 billion would be a very strong performance indeed, $1 billion more likely, and $700-$800 million easy enough to picture--while I will add that, even if I think it unlikely, I do not wholly rule out a Solo-like collapse. (After all, it was what happened the last time that the studio put out "Han Solo" in summer with Phoebe Waller-Bridge for a sidekick--though more seriously the movie would seem to have many a strike against its matching its predecessor.)

The result is that it is quite possible for the movie to be a money-loser at that stage of the game, at least where the theatrical run is concerned--with all that spells for other revenue sources, and the continued salience of the franchise, for which there indeed seem to have been plans. All of this would seem to suggest additional holes in the Disney balance sheet--which is already pretty hole-filled these days, though in fairness I doubt anyone else in the industry could say otherwise after years of pandemic-battered moviegoing and the unhinged spending on for-streaming content.

An Indiana Jones TV Show Ended Before it Even Began?

It was recently reported that Disney canceled a planned "spin-off" series based on the Indiana Jones character (like so many such efforts, a prequel about a younger Indy still being mentored by old Ravenwood).

Given the general retreat from high-cost streaming content on the part of the Disney studio in the wake of massive losses here I am not too surprised by the report, the more in as this seems part of a broader decision to focus on Star Wars, which is probably a bigger prize, and also plenty to keep Lucasfilm busy. I am also unsurprised in that recently restored Disney CEO Bob Iger had green-lit The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles back in his ABC days (indeed, this was part of his "in" with George Lucas when he approached him about buying out Lucasfilm)--and then watched the series prove an expensive flop. (In fact, I suspect this may have factored into, to go by reports circa 2016, Iger's thinking Indy less likely "to have a massive shared universe like Star Wars does.")

Still, if this can seem part of a broader retrenchment, and a matter of Iger having already "been burned" by a prior young Indiana Jones series, I can't help wondering if this is not in its way an indication of less than great confidence in the appeal of the new movie anchoring any continuation or expansion of the franchise.

After Ant-Man 3 How Does the Rest of the Year Look for Marvel?

In the wake of the letdown of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase 4, the opening act of Phase 5 proved . . . something of another letdown for Marvel Studios. As of its seventh weekend in global play (this one went worldwide at the outset, and China was included, so that's not an excuse this time) it has taken in a mere $212 million in North America, and $261 million overseas. Looking at the numbers (a mere $1.2 million added in the last weekend) I feel confident in saying it will fall well short of the $220 million mark domestically at the close of its run (think more like $216 million or so), and of the half billion dollar mark globally, that had still seemed within the range of possibility just a few weeks ago. It is a grave disappointment by comparison with even the preceding Ant-Man 2 (which scored just under $260 million domestic and $750 million global when one adjusts 2018's dollars for today's prices), let alone the higher expectations some held out for this film. (A mere month before Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania's release Screen Rant's Cooper Hood predicted a billion-dollar take--more than twice what the third Ant-Man will actually collect in theaters.)

What are the chances of Marvel's subsequent 2023 releases brightening the picture?

To be frank, not very good. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 does have that first big May weekend, and while I personally liked the Guardians better than most of the other Marvel series', box office-wise they are, again, more Thor than Avengers. Moreover, whatever the merits of the third entry it is hard to picture anything that will make it go much bigger this late in its run. On the contrary, I see no reason to expect it to be immune to Marvel's broader erosion, such that, even with higher ticket prices, making the billion dollar mark will be a challenge. Meanwhile the upcoming The Marvels, while if following up a genuine billion-dollar hit in Captain Marvel, is a sequel to a movie that may have been relatively divisive for audience, while it looks to have a big tie-in with a Disney Plus TV series that not everyone will have watched--an approach which may have been a liability with Dr. Strange 2. (One may also wonder what to make of the movie's getting kicked down the road from July to what may be a less harshly competitive spot in November--the more in as we hear of a need for extra time in "post-production.") And again, there is that broader Marvel erosion. The result is that it is not difficult to picture the movie doing less well than the original Captain Marvel, maybe a good deal less well, such that even the bullish Screen Rant predicted a take in the $950 million range--in real terms, almost a quarter of the way down from the over $1.3 billion that Captain Marvel took in when one adjusts its gross for 2022 dollars, and again, less than that seeming very plausible (even if I see no reason yet to expect an Ant-Man 3-like collapse).

Of course, there will be two other Marvel movies--the follow-up to the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Across the Spider-Verse), and Kraven the Hunter. Still, selling animated action to American audiences (rather than family-oriented musical comedy) is tough, and the first movie, if reasonably judged a hit, fell short of the $400 million mark globally, making it a different kind of product operating at a different level, even if it ends up being a success. Meanwhile Kraven the Hunter is another project ultimately based on a relatively minor Spider-Man villain, with discussion comparing it not to Spider-Man but to Venom--such that, even if it succeeds, it will be in a different way and on a different scale. The result is that were Guardians and the Marvels to do badly at the box office these films, even if overperforming, would not plausibly represent salvation for the MCU in anything like its current form.

Why Are There so Many "Chrises" in Hollywood These Days? (The Popularity of the Name "Chris" Over Time)

It has become a well-known joke that the action heroes starring in big-budget action blockbusters today are . . . a bunch of Chrises (Chris Pratt, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pine), with some comparing one Chris to another and a similarly popular joke that one of these figures is "the worst Chris." (You probably know which one. If you don't, here's a hint: you've probably heard him try to get people to call him "Star-Lord.")

It occurred to me that this is probably a reflection of the popularity of the name "Christopher" at the time of their birth--which happens to be the 1979-1983 period. (Christopher Pratt was born in 1979, Christopher Pine in 1980, Christopher Evans in 1981.)

As it happened, this was exactly the case. According to the Social Security Administration Christopher was the second most popular male baby name in the United States every single year through the 1979-1994 period--which covers the 1979-1981 period when Chris Pratt, Chris Evans and Chris Pine were born. Of course, Christopher Hemsworth was born in Australia--but it may be that the name was almost as popular in that country when Hemsworth was born in 1983 (#3 in New South Wales, at any rate).

So there really is a reason for there being so many famous Chrises in Hollywood blockbusters at once--which suggests we are unlikely to see quite so many in the years to come. For while Christopher was the second most popular name for those sixteen years, and almost as popular for longer (in the top 5 in 1972-1998, top 10 in 1967-2009), its popularity pretty much collapsed after the '00s (tumbling from #10 in 2009 to #52 in 2021 just a dozen years later).

What replaced it in the #2 spot? In succession, Matthew, Jacob, Michael (which had been #1 when Christopher was #2), Ethan, Mason, Jacob again, and Liam--such that maybe a few decades on movie-watchers will be arguing about the "worst" Michael or Jacob or Liam instead.

Julian Jaynes' Theory of Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence Research Today

Back in the 1970s psychologist Julian Jaynes argued that human consciousness as we know it only emerged in the second millennium B.C.. His book about the subject, The Original of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind details his argument about what consciousness is, and is not; how humans existed and functioned--indeed, functioned to the point of founding civilization, with its agriculture, cities, letters, science, empires--without consciousness; the process by which the "bicameralism" he describes broke down and gave way to a world of conscious human beings of the kind we take for granted; and with the legacies of the earlier bicameralism all around us (especially evident in the major world religions).

I cannot say that Jaynes convinced me of the rightness of his hypothesis--but I nonetheless found the argument intriguing, and still do, with elements of it, at least, seeming to me to have a great deal of explanatory power. Of particular interest to me at the moment is the challenge he presented to our (admittedly fuzzy) notions of consciousness, and especially his argument that consciousness is not a capacity for sensation and observation, or the ability to learn, recall, think, reason, all of which he holds to be mainly unconscious processes. Rather he holds that what he regards consciousness as being (to use the words in which I summed it up earlier) a model of the world around us we carry around in our heads enabling us to introspect, visualize and take decisions in a self-aware manner. Built upon the capacity of language to create metaphors, it consists of selected ("excerpted") details, arranged according to a sense of space and "spatialized" time, and organized in narrative form, with dissonant information reconciled around an image of the self (as seen by oneself and by others)--it is only a small part of our mental life.

Considering the matter of artificial intelligence with Jaynes' theory in mind I find myself thinking that if consciousness is not inherently human, but rather a late development in human history; and a relatively small part of our mental lives without which we can and do sense, observe, learn, remember, think and reason; then it is less useful than it might seem as a basis for delineating and defining the human as against the non-human--or even in delineating and defining "intelligence." That is to say that a machine which did not display consciousness could indeed be functioning in the ways that the human minds does--and less quickly dismiss "a mere autocomplete function" as doing something other than we ourselves do most of the time.

"Just How Much Do People Really Read?" Again

I have long had the impression that there is a tendency to underestimate the effect that "the digital age" has had on reading, and especially on certain kinds of reading--fully attentive, word-for-word reading rather than skimming; long-form reading; and the reading of fiction, particularly where this means routine, copious fiction reading for pleasure.

The result is that when reading the New Yorker piece about "The End of the English Major" the remarks of Columbia Professor of English James Shapiro caught my eye. The figure in question--a professor of English, and at that, not some adjunct baited and switched into a life of endless grading of mind-destroying student papers for minimum wage whose reading anything else might be thought suspect by employer and students alike, but a full professor at an Ivy League institution with all the privileges of that position--confessed that where he had typically read "five novels a month" down into the earlier years of this century if he "read[s] one a month now, it's a lot."

Think about that--even someone who has devoted his life to the teaching and study of literature, in circumstances about as good as are offered to any academic, admitted on the record that during this century his novel-reading has collapsed perhaps eighty percent or more.

He was also quite clear on the causes, acknowledging that this was "not because I've lost interest in fiction. It's because I'm reading a hundred Web sites. I'm listening to podcasts."

So are just about all of us in some degree. And it would be better if we started to admit the situation--especially those of us at all concerned with such issues as the publishing industry, the working conditions of and compensation for writers, the humanities in society, and what may be the consequences of declining literacy, rather than continuing with the quite stupid "Oh, people read as much as ever they did!" charade in which so many persist explicitly or implicitly (as when they, for example, look at the way the Young Adult fiction boom went bust).

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: A Box Office Gross Prediction

I previously considered the prospects of the upcoming Indiana Jones film at the box office this summer. In doing so I was more concerned with considering the factors that may work against it, as a film being released in 2023 and as against its predecessors, than attempting to forecast its earnings--but it is to that that I will turn here.

For this purpose I think a good starting point is the performance of the previous Indiana Jones sequels which, adjusted for inflation, tended to run in approximately the $400-$500 million range in North America, with a downward trend evident from the top to the bottom of that range. Measured in 2022 dollars there was a roughly 9 percent drop from the gross of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to that of The Last Crusade, and a 7 percent drop between The Last Crusade and Crystal Skull. Should that continue then we would have reason to expect something around $400 million for Dial of Destiny, while even the film's doing a good deal better (beating out Crystal Skull and Last Crusade to approximate Temple of Doom's performance, for instance) would still leave its gross within the $400-$500 million range of its predecessors. Especially as such grosses have since been routinized to some degree (seven films made something like this amount of money in real terms in that last "normal" year for the box office, 2019), this does not seem at all implausible.* Meanwhile the last two films in the Indiana Jones franchise grossed about 40 percent of their money at home--again, a familiar enough figure,such that it is probable the movie will not do better than that (especially should the talk about a Chinese release not happening be borne out).

The result is that, assuming the film's staying in the accustomed range for the series domestically and internationally, we would be looking at a global gross in the vicinity of $1-1.25 billion (again, the more plausible in that, adjusting for inflation, at least nine movies of 2019 pulling in a billion or more globally). However, there is some reason to think the film will fall short of that range. Overexploitation, prior missteps, waning nostalgia, an aging fan base, an ever-more crowded market could all take their toll on it as they have so many other franchises, like Star Wars--while the particular tone of the film, and its less-than-ebullient buzz, make it that much easier to picture the film underperforming than overperforming. Accordingly it seems not at all implausible that the quarter-billion dollar margin between the $1 billion mark suggested by the above calculation and the series' peak should also extend in the opposite direction--the movie's take falling into the $750 million-$1 billion range (with, at the bottom end, given the 40/60 split seen in the past, this looking like a $300 million domestic gross and $450 million from overseas). Indeed, while I do not expect it, given all that the movie seems to have against it I do not wholly rule out a Solo-like collapse (the movie's making a "mere" half billion dollars or less). But the $750 million-$1.25 billion range seems to me the more probable, if with the low end of the range the more probable than the high ($750 million-$1 billion, rather than $1 billion+).

Of course, for all the number-crunching this may look wrong-headed in just a little while--and if the information available changes then the only reasonable thing to do is to analyze that and take what result we get from that. But for now this is my guess--and I have very little expectation of any dramatic change in the situation in the weeks and months ahead.

* The seven films in question are Joker, Aladdin, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Star Wars Episode IX (The Rise of Skywalker), Captain Marvel, Frozen 2 and Toy Story 4, while the remake of The Lion King and Avengers: Endgame did considerably better (the latter, in 2022 dollars, pulling in almost a billion in North America alone, and tripling that globally).

NOTE: For the author's post-Cannes premiere review of the prospects of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny taking into account the box office tracking data released in early June, click here. For a more recent take prior to the opening weekend, click here.

Can Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Be Another Top Gun: Maverick?

Recently reading what others have had to say about the prospects of Indiana Jones 5 I was struck by one possibility some have raised--that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny could, like Top Gun: Maverick, be a spectacular overperformer at the box office along similar lines as another follow-up to a "feel-good" '80s-era action blockbuster, with a star of the kind like they don't make anymore in the lead and plenty of nostalgic appeal, which through all this really connects with a moviegoing public that comes back to experience it over and over and over again.

I can see where they are coming from on this--but skeptical that Top Gun 2 is a good analog for Indiana Jones 5, for five reasons, three of which (numbers 1, 4 and 5) were pretty much ignored in the comment I read about last year's hit:

1. The memory of the original Top Gun was, in 2022, undimmed in the memories of fans by any exploitation after the original. By contrast Raiders of the Lost Ark has had three sequels, with both films three, and four, each giving the impression that it was "the last one" (with Indiana and company literally riding off into the sunset at the end of the "last" crusade, and then, in a movie redolent with the sense of Jones' time as adventurer as past, and now an assistant dean, married man and father)--and thus that anything further would not only go over the same ground yet again (as Crystal Skull seemed to be to many), but merely another go-round for the sake of a crass cash grab. It did not help that number four was received as less than a triumph (the film's audience score on Rotten Tomatoes a mere 53 percent). It also does not help that Disney's handling of Star Wars, the closest point of comparison to Indiana Jones 5 by far (the only really comparable franchise, likewise a Lucas-Ford show), has disappointed so many under the same exact management, and may be handling Jones the same way, the more in as some of the casting decisions weirdly similar to those of the divisive Star Wars movies (with Mads Mikkelsen again a man of uncertain loyalties working on a critical space project for a government at war, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge once more a "sidekick" to "Han Solo"). By contrast Top Gun 2 had no such baggage.

2. While much of the cultural, "zeitgeist"-type analysis of Top Gun 2 was simplistic (in line with the movie itself, frankly), there may be something to the argument that those who came out for it responded to the clear-cut good guys vs. bad guys premise and upbeat, Rah-rah spirit of the film. As recently described the James Mangold-helmed Indiana Jones 5 is expected to go in the opposite direction (if Logan was anything to go by, the extreme opposite direction), such that the same kind of satisfaction will simply not be on offer, and indeed, anyone looking for it is likely to come away feeling cheated--hardly the response Top Gun 2 elicited.

3. Just as one has to be cautious with talk of films and the zeitgeist, one has to be cautious in regard to the ways in which movie grosses interact with the country's culture wars--a very complex subject ill-served by the simplistic narratives constantly pushed on us--while I have seen lots of rhetoric but little hard data regarding Top Gun 2 specifically. (I have heard, for example, that like Taken the movie really exploded in the "Red" states and not so much the "Blue," but again, they had no hard data, or even industry insider comment, to offer in support of their claims.) Still, just as the Rah-rah spirit of the movie worked in its favor I will allow that Top Gun 2 may have had a boost in some quarters from its being perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a "conservative" film, perhaps to the point that going seemed in itself a way of "showing support for their side" and a rebuke to the other side. By contrast Indiana Jones 5 has been branded a "woke" film in some quarters, diminishing its appeal among those who went to see Top Gun 2 for such reasons. Of course, if "conservative" films have their audience, many a hit has also been scored on the basis of "wokeness" too--as with Black Panther or Captain Marvel--but I do not see Indy 5 as having that kind of cachet with that crowd, so there can be no compensating effect from that corner.

4. In the months leading up to Top Gun 2's release, through that release, and after, the media cheerled for the film as one (as seen not only in the 96 percent score it got from the critics on Rotten Tomatoes--as against the much poorer score the virtually identical original had from critics--but the commentary, where even what look like critical pieces at first glance turn out to be more "Rah-rah!"). Thus far Indy 5 has not had anything to compare with such support--and I see little sign of this changing in the three months between the time of this writing and the film's release.

5. When Top Gun 2 came out in the summer of 2022 it had the advantage of very weak summer competition--a mere three other tentpoles none of them a really stellar performer, which I am convinced permitted it its particularly strong legs. It hit theaters three weeks after a less than overwhelming Dr. Strange 2, and two weeks before a Jurassic World movie that did rather less well than its two predecessors, while Thor 4 came out four whole weeks later and had only a lackluster run, and was not followed by another equally big movie for months--which meant that much more room for Top Gun to keep drawing audiences (the movie's Friday-to-Sunday takes not slipping below the $10 million mark until its tenth weekend in release, on the way to its collecting a staggering six times what it took in its first weekend of play).

Indiana Jones 5 will not have anything close to that. It will come out a mere two weeks after The Flash, which, doing as well as the buzz suggests (prompting repeat viewings, good word-of-mouth, etc.), could have pretty good legs itself, while Mission: Impossible 7--which may be a stronger performer than usual given the good will toward Tom Cruise in the wake of the very same Top Gun 2 we have been talking about the whole time--will be along just two weeks after that, positioning each to take a bite out of Indy's grosses over its first three weekends, in a more generally crowded summer.

Of course, these factors--the weakening of interest in the franchise as a result of past missteps with Indiana Jones 4 and Disney's handling of Lucasfilm generally; the difference in tone, political associations and media attitude; and the more competitive summer season--do not guarantee that Indiana Jones 5 will not "overperform." However, if this were to happen (and admittedly I think it unlikely) it will not be on the basis of those factors that worked so much in Top Gun's favor, its success achieved in a different way and under different conditions.

Is This the Singularity . . . or Just Lowering the Bar?

In his important rebuttal to the New Economy hype of the 1990s Robert Gordon pointed to "hand-and-eye coordination" as a significant barrier in regard to the fuller, more thoroughly productivity-enhancing computerization of the economy, while in 2013 the Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne-authored Future of Work study likewise identified "perception and manipulation" as one of the most significant "bottlenecks" for the automation of work. Accordingly the designers of artificial intelligence systems overcoming these barriers and passing through these obstacles with computer-guided machines able to perform eye-hand coordination-demanding, perception-and-manipulation-intensive tasks of these kinds adequately and reliably would betoken a great advance in the prospects for automation--and the technological state-of-the-art in the field of "AI."

Of course, a generation after Gordon wrote, a decade after Frey and Osborne wrote, progress here has been . . . unimpressive. And indeed, after a surge of hype in the mid-'10s during which self-driving cars and the beginnings of a tidal wave of workplace automation were supposed to change everything, just about NONE OF IT HAPPENED (even flipping burgers has been a bigger challenge than appreciated), after which the excitement about AI waned these past few years.

However, in recent months OpenAI's new chatbot, "GPT-3.5," and then just this month, the follow-up, GPT-4, got (some) people excited again. Indeed, reading Ezra Klein's New York Times opinion piece on the matter--among many, many others--I was consistently struck by the sense so many had not only of the GPT's approximation of human capacities, but of profound acceleration in the rate of progress in that emulation.

The kind of acceleration that had me start typing into Google "Is GPT-4 the Singularity?" and finding the search engine's autocomplete finishing the thought for me; while after I hit ENTER I saw from the search results that this is exactly the question lots and lots of people seem to be asking--and many answering that question in the affirmative. Calum Chace, for example, argues in Forbes that yes, this is a significant step in that direction.

Looking at all that there seems little doubt that many are greatly impressed by the chatbots' level of functionality--or at least what they are being told about it. (An oft-cited talking point, the more significant in its not necessarily being so straightforward as it sounds, is its scoring in the 90th percentile on the Bar Exam, whereas the GPT-3.5 version had scored only in the 10th.) But it can also seem to be the case that after the comparative bust of the mid-'10s wave of techno-hype, which may have led them to write off certain kinds of automation (e.g. the eye-hand coordination-requiring stuff) as not worth thinking about, they are easily impressed by developments in an area to which they paid less attention and about which they have accordingly not become so cynical as they are about, for instance, self-driving cars--while the Silicon Valley-to-Wall Street boosters, their courtiers and claqueurs in the media, and even the "criti-hype" of those folks who shout "Oh no, it's Skynet! We're doomed! DOOMED!" at every development making the most of that readiness to believe.

The Summer Movie Season of 2023: Predictions

Last summer, during which it seemed fairly clear that the American and global box office were both recovering, the take still fell short of what the industry hoped for--in large part, in my view, because there were fewer than the usual number of big "tentpole" releases. (There were just Dr. Strange 2, Jurassic Park 3/6, Top Gun 2 and Thor 4, with the quiver empty after early July--four releases stretched thin over the first two months or so instead of a more evenly spread out eight over the four month period.)

By contrast the summer of 2023 looks to be on par with pre-pandemic summers in this respect, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast and Furious 10, Mission: Impossible 7, Transformers 6, The Flash and even Indiana Jones 5 coming our way in May-July, with Meg 2 and Blue Beetle coming in August.

Will these do the trick?

The Guardian series is relatively well-received ("worst" Chris and all), but box office-wise more Thor than Avengers--while Marvel's brand has not been looking its best lately. The Transformers franchise is even more clearly "not what it used to be." Blue Beetle is an "upgrade" of a formerly straight-to-streaming release about another second-stringer (as an alternative to the cancellation seen with Batgirl), and seems a particular long shot for a first-rank hit. And as I have said earlier, I am not very optimistic about Indiana Jones 5, which I think may fall into that ever-larger territory of "huge gross by any sane standard, but arguable flop given what it cost to make, what it netted at the end, and the expectations people must have had for it" (the way that, for example, Ant-Man 3 or Black Panther 2 have done, and maybe not even with more cash in the till).

That leaves the other three. If MI7 may do as well as its predecessors I do not expect to see it better those movies, which do well enough by spy-fi standards but fall short of the absolute top (though a billion dollar take does not seem wholly out of the question, if mainly as a function of rising ticket prices, although I can also picture it getting a bump from good will from the press and from fans of Top Gun 2 toward Tom Cruise). And Fast and Furious 10 will probably do better--though not necessarily beat its predecessors (impressive as their earnings have been).

That leaves The Flash. Apparently the feature film about the character has really, really great buzz--the buzz actually holding it to be better than any DC Universe film seen in a long time, maybe the best of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) lot, maybe better than anything since Christopher Nolan's Batman films (the assumption, of course, being that these were superlative, an opinion I share less and less ). Still, the Flash is no Batman or Wonder Woman, I suspect no character is completely immune to superhero fatigue and DC Universe fatigue, and the DC Extended Universe as we know it is known to be on its way out, while I suspect the earlier, absolutely terrible, publicity attaching to the person in question(which less than a year ago had people talking of "cancellation" of the film and its star) will not be conveniently and completely forgotten eleven weeks from now. A wildly successful Flash movie is therefore no sure thing, no matter how good it supposedly is--but it may have more potential to surprise observers than anything else.

All the same, even with The Flash proving a hit--even its proving the biggest hit in DCEU history--I expect that all this will add up to a summer that, while clearly better than any of the last three years, looks more like a mediocre pre-pandemic summer than a sensational one.

Has the Hollywood Video Game Adaptation Become Respectable?

I remember how the first Super Mario Bros. movie was supposed to be one of the big summer movies of 1993--right along with such movies as Cliffhanger, Last Action Hero and Jurassic Park.

The reception was much more Last Action Hero than Jurassic Park. Indeed, it would seem to have fared even worse than Last Action Hero, going not just by its much-smaller gross, but how it was mostly forgotten, such that while it (probably) had its run on premium cable, I never ran into it on TV in the years afterward. Only in 2008, doing research for a piece on video game adaptations, did I try to seek it out--and as it happened, in those years when DVDs were typically packed with extras in an attempt to make them something people would choose to buy rather than just rent the one edition of that DVD I tracked down had just the movie on it. The viewing of that movie proved to me that, much as I hoped otherwise, it was no hidden gem.*

Indeed, fifteen years after its release the movie's principal legacy would seem to have been starting a tradition of poorly received adaptations of the type, with 1994's Double Dragon and Street Fighter not doing much better, etc., etc.. With 1995's Mortal Kombat the genre did seem to get its first real money-maker (there was a sequel, after all), but all the same, the growing list of commercial successes (some of which did attract a more durable following than the '93 Super Mario Bros.) did little to diminish the opprobrium.

Of course, it has since been another fifteen years--and there has been a measure of change since. The second crack at a Mortal Kombat franchise was no great commercial or critical success when it came out in 2021, but still seems to have commanded a bit more respect than the first. (Mortal Kombat 2 had a 4 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes--not a typo!--and a not much better 20 percent from audiences, in contrast with the 54 percent score from the critics and the 86 percent score from audiences the 2021 movie had.) Sonic the Hedgehog has certainly done better than that--been, in fact, rather well-received by pandemic standards (the second movie one of the top ten hits at the recovering 2022 North American box office, while garnering a 69 percent with the critics and a 96 percent with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes). And now, as the action increasingly moves to the small screen, a TV series based on The Last of Us has actually become a prestige TV-loving critical darling.

In all this it is a different world indeed.

* Interestingly about that time I found out while teaching a class in science fiction literature that at the time of release the movie won over a great many very young fans who, even after being college-aged, still had fond memories of it. All the same, none of this seems to have gone so far as to produce any evidence of a cult following.

What Do the Superhero Flops Tell Us About the Box Office Today?

It has long been generally recognized that getting audiences out to a movie increasingly requires the audience's perceiving a film's release as an "event." Once upon a time splashy big-budget action blockbusters almost automatically had event status. However, there are now so many of them that something more is required, and increasingly it seems the case that, even where superhero movies are concerned, the "second-stringers" will not "cut it"--with a movie with a less well-known protagonist and a budget in the range of a "mere" $100 million falling into that category, as with a Shazam. Meanwhile, in the wake of the anticlimax anything past the Battle with Thanos has been (and probably could only have been), and the lack of ideas that even by superhero blockbuster standards could be called "compelling" for those films that followed (Spider-Man's big multiverse event excepted) it has been harder and harder to make the multiple Marvel releases still coming the audience's way seem like the "event" they were in the days before there had already been thirty of them (!), as evidenced by the less than triumphant result of the decision to debut the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Five with Ant-Man 3--the second-stringer, even when given a more than usually prominent place in the bigger mythos and backed with a $200 million budget not delivering the goods.

We hear from time to time of Marvel fatigue, and that could seem a consideration, but as the case of Shazam 2 and much else shows, there may also be DC fatigue, and superhero fatigue, and big sci-fi actioner fatigue, and blockbuster fatigue. After all, the action movie, and the high-concept blockbuster as we know it generally, go back to the '60s-era James Bond films, thoroughly arrived in Hollywood with Star Wars, and have been a routine and increasingly large part of our cinematic diet since the '80s. The result is that no one under the age of fifty can remember a time when the movie houses were not full of the stuff, which can now seem pretty well played-out, even down to the visuals (the CGI boom so clearly underway with the original Jurassic Park now entering its fourth decade)--and while, admittedly, critics who thought there was too much such stuff have been forecasting its demise for decades, I suspect they are right in, if not necessarily the boom going bust, then at least the peak for this kind of film-making passing. If so, this will confront the industry with some hard decisions that, to all evidences, it is spectacularly ill-equipped to make. Of course, so it seemed as the studio system was falling apart--and from that emerged a New Hollywood today remembered as one of the most vibrant periods in the history of American cinema. Still, as a significant chronicler of that period recounted, that was a very different world from this, financially, technologically, politically and culturally, and I suspect that should history indeed repeat itself in this respect, it will do so only as farce.