Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Are the Superhero Movies of Today in the Same Place as the Musicals of the Late '60s?

When we look into the history of the film of the 1960s we are apt to be regaled with tales of the edgy New Hollywood, stressing its countercultural impulses and its artistic experimentalism and its radical politics and its generally avant garde, edgier, racier material.

One would never guess from such writing that the biggest box office hit of the decade was . . . The Sound of Music.

One would also never guess that this success did not come out of nowhere--or end with it. After all, the studios, trying to compete with TV, went in for Panavision-Technicolor spectacle, with the choice of content favoring the historical epic (usually Biblical or early Roman Empire, or World War II, though with a sprinkling of Westerns and Medieval adventure), and the splashy, often Broadway hit-derived musical, and steadily "going bigger" in the process. Of course, they were not long in hitting a limit. The colossal Cleopatra (which cost $31 million to produce, and another $13 million to market and distribute), was budget-busting even by today's standards, and even as the biggest moneymaker of its year (1963) regarded as an underperformer. That result, along with that on Anthony Mann's The Fall of the Roman Empire the following year (a $16 million production that made back a lot less than that), pretty much marked the end of the readiness to back big historical epics.* But The Sound of Music (1965) suggested musicals were still worthwhile, and sheer box office earnings encouraged the studios to pour ever more money into such projects--like Camelot, Oliver!, and in 1969, Sweet Charity, Paint Your Wagon, and Hello, Dolly!

The results varied commercially, as well as artistically, but people did see them. In fact, Paint Your Wagon and Hello, Dolly! were among their year's top ten hits. The problem was that so much money had been poured into them, and the expectations that drove such open-handedness were so high, that, like Cleopatra, even being fair-sized hits they were deemed disappointments that helped end the long-running fashion, and even more certainly the scaling up so long evident. Of course, for all that Hollywood has never stopped making musicals, and even scoring significant hits with them (Fiddler on the Roof, Grease, Chicago). However, I think it safe to say that the genre never recovered its fecundity, or place at the box office, the really new but old-style musical a rarity--while if some musicals do become big money-makers commercially the genre, save for the occasional big animated film, rarely become really first-rank hits. Indeed, these days, thinking of a likely hit we are likely to think not of the musical genre but the big splashy sci-fi action movie, and especially the superhero movie, which seems to me in similar territory these days as the musicals were in back in the '60s. The studios, hard-pressed to get people away from their newfangled gadgets and counting on ever-more spectacular films from a very short list of genres to do it, keep pouring ever-more money into colossal films of the type--productions so big that they can only be justified by extraordinary expectations that consistently lead to serious disappointment (the DC Extended Universe, almost all of Marvel after Phase Three, etc., etc.), so much so that it might not take much more disappointment to make the game appear to be no longer worth the candle.

Of course, as the predominance of the old musical waned other genres were emergent. In a reminder that the Hollywood executives of a half century ago were probably not much more intelligent than those of today they proved very slow indeed to catch on to the potential of the action film--and in one of the greater ironies of film history's more recent decades, it actually fell to a Godard-loving auteur theory-minded film school graduated upstart to make them appreciate it. But if any new genre promises sufficient theatrical draw to keep Hollywood viable along anything like its current lines is emergent the fact would seem to have escaped everyone, such that I would not bet on some latterday George Lucas supplying the Suits with another basis for building a hit factory.

* Adjusted for inflation the production budget for Cleopatra comes to $300 million (with distribution and promotion costing another $120 million).

The Post-War Commercial Predominance of the Historical Epic and the Musical: 1949-1966

Looking back I think we forget just how big a force at the box office historical epics and big splashy musicals were in that period between the onset of the decline of the studios in the late 1940s (as TV emerged, etc.), and the arrival of the "New Hollywood" in the 1960s. Going by Wikipedia's listings the eighteen year 1949-1966 period, a historical epic (most often Biblical-Roman, or World War II-based), or a musical (most of which were also period pieces), was the #1 movie at the North American box office for sixteen years--Jolson Sings Again in 1949, Samson and Delilah in 1950, Quo Vadis in 1951, The Robe in 1953, White Christmas in 1954, The Ten Commandments in 1956, The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, South Pacific in 1958, Ben-Hur in 1959, Spartacus in 1960, West Side Story in 1961, The Longest Day in 1962, Cleopatra in 1963, Mary Poppins in 1964, The Sound of Music in 1965, Hawaii in 1966.

By contrast a period piece has not held the #1 spot at the North American box office since Pirates of the Caribbean 2 in 2006, before which one could (at least discounting Agrabah, Middle Earth, Far Far Away and Arendelle as not actually part of history, and Back to the Future as only partly set in the past and not really about that past) only accord that status to Saving Private Ryan in 1998, Titanic in 1997, Forrest Gump in 1994, Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, and Grease in 1978--a mere five occasions in the past forty-six years, three of them in one highly anomalous mid-to-late '90s patch. Meanwhile, at least discounting animated movies, Grease was the last time that a live-action musical has been its year's highest-grosser (which is to say that this has not happened in the lifetime of most Americans).

All of this, of course, reflects a broader popularity, which had the list of the top ten earning movies of any given year saturated with hits of those genres, including such Biblical/Roman epics as David and Bathsheba, Salome and King of Kings; period pieces with other themes (besides the aforementioned matter of World War II, Westerns and the occasional mainly Medieval adventure) like How the West Was Won, Ivanhoe, The Vikings and El Cid; and in the musical category, 1954's A Star is Born, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, There's No Business Like Show Business, Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Auntie Mame, The Music Man, My Fair Lady and The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

These days, plentiful as they can sometimes seem, musicals very rarely break into the top ten, with 2018--a year particularly rich in such hits--a good example. Four such movies ranked among the top 25 films of the year--the seemingly five millionth remake of A Star is Born, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Greatest Showman and Mamma Mia 2--but not one of them actually made the top ten, with the most successful, A Star is Born, making only the #12 spot.* Moreover, it is striking how many of our big musicals are, especially when they are not remakes of past hits (like A Star is Born or West Side Story), or similarly backward looking in some way (as with Bohemian Rhapsody and Mamma Mia 2, both of which ultimately depend on the continued popularity of singers, acts and hits of decades ago, Queen and ABBA in these two cases), take on a different shape--as with, again, Disney-type cartoons (like Frozen), or apt to be plain and simple curiosities (like the upcoming Joker 2).

It all bespeaks a very different market indeed--in which sci-fi/fantasy exotica has displaced the exotica of past eras, and the choreography of the action sequence the choreography of the song and dance routine, with both exemplified by the predominance of speculative fiction-themed adventure, and above all, the superhero genre that has been its most consistently successful variation.

* Granted, Bohemian Rhapsody did better globally, making the #6 spot and almost becoming a billion-dollar hit in the process--but this was an extreme outlier, as shown by how A Star is Born, now the second-biggest musical hit of the year, got knocked down to the #21 spot and The Greatest Showman fell out of the top 25.

Deadline and the Five Biggest Box Office Failures of 2022: Some Thoughts

When it comes to talk of "hits" and "flops," of "blockbusters" and "bombs," even those of us who bother to consult the data regarding the financial performance of particular films usually have to make do with just a few of the relevant numbers--namely reported production budgets, and box office grosses. Just how much money a studio actually shelled out to get a movie made (as against how much was carried by government subsidy and product placement), just how much it cost to distribute and promote the movie, how much of the gross the studio got after divvying it up with distributors, what it made from other revenue streams (like video, or merchandising), are not consistently available to us.

For that reason when considering the issue I go by the (admittedly very conservative) rule of thumb that a movie which did not make at least 4-5 times its production budget is at least susceptible to the charge that it did not break even on the theatrical run, which is likely to imply that, even with all the rest counted in it just did not do terribly well (because home video is no substitute for ticket sales, because people do not buy much merchandise for flops, etc.). This is not always the case, of course--studios sometimes having a movie's cost covered before it even starts shooting through early sales of key rights, or subsidies and product placement pick up a big part of the tab, or they get a bigger than usual share of the theatrical revenue, or other revenue streams prove unusually strong. Sometimes the mechanics of all this actually prove very different from the conventional operation of the movies. (Pixar's Cars movies are not its biggest successes--but given the colossal merchandise sales even if they were just expensive ads for the $10 billion in product they moved by 2011 alone they would have been well worthwhile.) Still, most of the time it seems to me to give a fairly good idea of a "worst-case" scenario, which is my concern here.

Deadline, however, publishes its own estimates for some of the more conspicuous hits and misses each year--apparently culled from various sources and perhaps incomplete but at least something more comprehensive with an eye to giving us the five most and five least profitable films of the annum. The news site skipped out on doing so in 2020 and 2021 when movie earnings were so battered that the exercise seemed pointless, but it has returned to its practice, doing so again for 2022.

According to its listing the five biggest "box office bombs" of 2022 were (I should think, to no one's surprise) Strange World, Amsterdam, Lightyear, Devotion and Babylon.

It seems notable that all five of the films fit into two distinct patterns.

Two of those films (Strange World and Lightyear) are big-budget Disney animated productions that can seem conventional enough in offering science-fiction adventure to a family audience, but going about it in a less-than-expected way more likely to please a hardcore audience than the general audience. (They made Buzz Lightyear an action hero in a straight adventure film rather than a comedic figure--voiced by Captain America instead of Tim the Toolman Taylor, no less! Meanwhile Strange World offered the kind of involved premise and retro aesthetic that makes for a cult following rather than a general audience hit.) They also stirred a lot of controversy--of the kind that does more harm than good--through their prominent LGBTQ+ "representation."

The other three films (Amsterdam, Devotion, Babylon), pointedly aimed at adults rather than families, are all lavish period pieces set between the 1920s and 1950s and generally dealing with themes that have historically not been successful with American audiences, while unlikely to do better overseas (Silent Era Hollywood, the Korean War--while David O. Russell's trying to make another American Hustle out of the events surrounding the Business Plot seem a long shot).

Within this set of three films two conformed to another, more specific pattern --specifically Russell's Amsterdam and David Chazelle's Babylon. Charges of competence or incompetence aside the essential handling of the material was unlikely to appeal to a big audience (Amsterdam studiedly "offbeat," Babylon frequently deliberately repellent), while at least two of the films would seem to have cost much more than they ought to have done (Amsterdam's budget certainly ballooning, the production of Babylon perhaps having seen something similar). It all suggests the combination of a lot of money with the independent movie sensibility that their writer-directors of independent film roots have displayed in the past--indeed, suggests big money combined with much of the worst of the indie sensibility. (Certainly David Walsh's review of Amsterdam characterizes it as full of "oddball characters . . . lack[ing] any special purpose or sharpness," with the star's performance "a series of irritating quirks"; the film more broadly as having a feel of "[a]morphousness, muddiness," comprised as it is of scenes that go nowhere between individuals whose motives are unclear and for the most part uninteresting," even with weighty, timely material at the center of things. Walsh's colleague Joannie Laurier wrote of Babylon as murky" and" "lack[ing] . . . substance and cohesiveness," even while being "crude, vulgar . . . cartoonish" as it characterizes "everything and everyone in the worst possible light." This looks edgy, but in actuality presents only the most conventional, even reactionary, critique, bespeaking a "demoralized . . . disoriented" perspective given over to "postmodern subjectivism" that prefers the simplicities of myth to the complexity of a reality that is a "closed book" to such filmmakers. Yup, pure independent all the way.)

As they let these indie film-makers run wild with big budgets in this way the producers would seem to have bet heavily on star power and critical acclaim to turn a profit, or at least not lose very much. Alas, as anyone who has been paying attention knows, star power does not deliver the way it used to (with Margot Robbie, who is about as close as any performer who made her name in recent years gets to being a star, getting black marks on her record from both films), while certainly the critical acclaim never came for either Amsterdam or Babylon.

I suspect that in that there is an irony--that when a formula-addicted Hollywood fails miserably it does even that in the most wearisomely formulaic way.

Monday, April 17, 2023

The Box Office for Shazam 2 and Ant-Man 3: An Update

Not so long ago I wrote here, after Shazam 2's opening weekend, that the movie might fall short of $80 million domestic and $200 million global--and thought myself pessimistic for doing so.

Right now that prediction looks wildly optimistic.

After four weeks in theaters in North America Shazam 2 has pulled in a mere $57 million--below the $60 million, never mind the $80 million mark.

Globally the situation has not been much better. Adding a mere $71 million to its take after being out in just about all the major markets for the same period (China included), the overseas drop is proving even sharper than the domestic one.

That would leaving it with less than $130 million at last count and not much further to go, which would be not quite one-third the adjusted-for-inflation gross of the none-too-stellar (frankly, marginal) original Shazam. Not only virtually guaranteeing it a spot in any list of the year's biggest money-losers, it is another black eye for the DC Universe that, even with a much-publicized overhaul in the works, could scarcely afford another blow.

At the same time Ant-Man 3 in its ninth weekend, is not even in the top ten films, but down to #22, and took in a mere $44,000, suggesting that it will top out at a mere $213 million domestically--while maybe not making $480 million globally.

All of this underlines just how badly these films have done--with the fact the more pointed given how, proving one cannot simply see their underperformance as a matter of some general box office-dampening effect, given that, even if the box office is not yet back to normal (the first three months this year saw $1.7 billion in ticket sales, as against the billion a month expected pre-pandemic), many other franchise films enjoyed robust grosses during the same time frame, including John Wick 4 and Creed 3 (meeting a more modest standard, but all the same, meeting it), and now the genuine blockbuster that is the new The Super Mario Bros. Movie. With nearly $350 million banked domestically (and approaching twice that globally), after a mere twelve days in theaters, it is the top-grossing release of 2023. And while it may not retain the title for much longer with the summer film season coming up fast, it is far from impossible that this, and not Guardians of the Galaxy 3, will be Chris Pratt's top-grossing film of the year.

If so, it would be yet another blow to not just the Marvel brand, but the ever more tired-looking superhero film genre as a whole, with still more pain locked into the schedule given just how much more MCU the public has coming its way. After all, with Phase 5's debut not making the half billion dollar mark, and the Guardians sequel failing to provide an overdue lift, what chance does a Kraven the Hunter movie have, even were it to have the makings of a hit? Or for that matter that subsequent MCU movie in which so much more is being invested, The Marvels?

What Can We Expect for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 at the Box Office?

Once again a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel is due that first weekend of May generally regarded as the start of the summer box office race.

How is it likely to do?

Considering that let us start with its predecessors. Put into 2022 dollars the take for the first (2013) Guardians would come to $970 million or so (with a 43/57 percent domestic/foreign split), and that for Guardians 2 (2017) about $1.03 billion (with a 45/55 domestic/foreign split). The result is that they averaged about $1 billion in today's terms--if with a bit of a bump between the first and second films, mainly on the domestic side (the film's earnings surging from $420 to almost $470 million here, as foreign sales held more or less steady in the $550-$570 million range).

Based on that one might expect the movie to make another billion or so, and maybe even a little more than that, given the promise of a trilogy being rounded out and positive reaction to the trailers. Still, audience responsiveness to the MCU has been eroding, with Ant-Man 3, well, looking very disappointing indeed, falling short not just of the billion dollars optimists were so clearly expecting, but even the half billion dollar mark the two preceding films cleared with ease (even in current dollars, never mind real terms), with the underperformance at home more than matched by what was seen internationally (the principal reason for the box office shortfall). It would seem complacent to think this means nothing for Guardians--the more in as it is just not clear that audiences are terribly excited about this one, whether one goes by "initial pre-sales . . . currently trending below all post-Endgame releases other than Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings," or the "social media impact" of pre-release marketing.

The result is that, while I do not rule out the movie's delivering Marvel's first billion dollar take since Spider-Man: No Way Home, I would not be shocked if Guardians was the lowest-grossing film in the Guardians trilogy, especially overseas--or even if it fell a similar way from a similar height. Were it to see proportional erosion of its domestic gross as Ant-Man 3 it would finish up with $400 million, while its international gross falling in the same fashion as it did in the case of Ant-Man 3 would leave it with perhaps $300 million more internationally, making for a $700 million take--a figure the easier to picture because it would put its gross roughly on a level with those of Thor 4 and Black Panther 2, likewise movies that would be considered colossal hits by any standard but at best underwhelming given the expectations associated with their budgets and the Marvel brand. Moreover, some are offering more pessimistic estimates, with the $400 million I suggest as Guardians' domestic gross here already the lowest real-terms take for the Guardians movie (about 5 percent down from the first movie's gross, and almost 15 percent down from the second movie's) actually the high end of the range anticipated by Boxoffice Pro. The lower end of their range has it failing to make the $300 million mark domestically--while one could expect the international gross to likewise suffer in such a scenario, leaving the movie with a good deal less than $700 million.

Should this come to pass this would spell real trouble for Marvel, not only with another high-cost disappointment, but what this means in a year in which Guardians was the studio's best chance to revive confidence in what seems ever more a formerly mighty brand in decline.

Friday, April 7, 2023

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.

Thursday, April 6, 2023

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.

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

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.

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