Guardians of the Galaxy 3: Reviewing the Range of Predictions

With Guardians of the Galaxy 3 about to kick off the summer movie season the range of predictions regarding the movie's box office gross discussed here may be of some interest. These are as follows:

* At the start of the year an analyst publishing in Screen Rant suggested $1.2 billion.

* Going by the inflation-adjusted performance of the first two Guardians films I considered $1 billion as the outcome were it to simply do as well as its predecessors (with a little over half coming from overseas).

* Considering how the last Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film did in comparison with its predecessor--how, as if the drops from film to film previously seen with Thor and Black Panther were not bad enough, Ant-Man 3's fell so far short of Ant-Man 2--I suggested a $700 million gross were Guardians 3 to see its gross drop in comparable fashion relative to Guardians 2 (as, with its domestic gross falling a rough sixth, its international gross closer to half, it winds up with a bit under $400 million at home, a little over $300 million more from overseas).

* Considering the expectations regarding its opening weekend I extrapolated a gross in the $700 million range from what the opening weekend meant for Guardians 2 (with $320 million at home, $420 million from abroad, $740 million plausible, though with the take easily less).

* Combining both the Ant-Man-like drop and the opening weekend now expected I got a gross closer to $600 million than $700 million, or even under the $600 million mark.

In all these you have a range from $1.2 billion down to half that or less in the relatively dark scenario I developed out of the combination of the precedent of Ant-Man 3, and the current, lowered, expectations for the opening weekend.

The high end of this range would be not just a morale-boosting topping of the billion-dollar mark for the MCU for only the second time since 2019 (the first was Spider-Man: No Way Home), but a series best for the Guardians movies.

The low end of this range would be very bad indeed for Marvel, given that Guardians is its best chance to demonstrate the franchise's continued health in 2023--while even calling into doubt whether the rather "pricey" movie would cover its cost.

Considering these numbers it is worth recalling that when Screen Rant's analyst offered the $1.2 billion estimate he also estimated that Ant-Man 3 would be a billion-dollar hit. In fact it made it less than half that, which is what we would see were the movie to wind up with <$600 million.

I do not rule out the possibility of such a collapse. But presented with these possibilities I am sticking with the $700 million take, give or take $50 million, predicted by both the current expectations for the opening weekend and the Ant-Man-style collapse calculation as the most likely outcome--not what backers or fans of the MCU would hope for, but not the worst-case scenario for now.

And thereby ends the speculation about how the film will do on the basis of anticipations and precedents. Within mere hours the movie will be in theaters--and for the short period in which speculation about its box office take will still have any meaning, people will be doing it from real numbers as the ticket-buyers finally have their say, deciding whether or not, as I suspected, Chris Pratt's highest grossing film this year is the one that has already been playing in theaters for a month.

What Will Guardians of the Galaxy 3 Make in its Opening Weekend?

A couple of weeks ago I offered an estimate of Guardians of the Galaxy 3's box office gross (that now, perhaps unsurprisingly given the movie's coming out Friday, seems to be getting a lot of traffic).

At the time I concerned myself with the film's overall box office performance, not its opening weekend performance, which is the main thing we are hearing about now. According to Variety, Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3, is expected to take in $120 million in its opening weekend at the domestic box office.

This sounds robust (and certainly the relevant media presents this as excellent). But $120 million is, even in current dollars, about a fifth down from what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 made in its opening weekend during the same three-day period in May (May 5-May 7) six years ago. Some $147 million, when one adjusts it for today's prices, that opening weekend take was more like $180 million.*

So basically the expectation is that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 will make a third less than Guardians of the Galaxy 2--suggesting the new movie's making a lot less than its predecessor.

Might the film have better "legs" offsetting an underwhelming opening weekend, however? I know of no reason to think so. Quite the contrary, it is a highly publicized threequel coming into a crowded-as-usual summer movie season very different from last year's, in which circumstances the same "front-loading" of the gross as was seen with the preceding movie made seem rather plausible. Guardians of the Galaxy picked up 38 percent of its total domestic gross in those first three days--a typical figure for high-profile sequels--and should Guardians of the Galaxy 3 do the same it would end up with about $320 million in the till. This is less than what the preceding Guardian films made in current dollar terms, and about a third down from what Guardians of the Galaxy 3 made in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

Down near the bottom end of the range of predictions previously being discussed (roughly, $290-$400 million), were the international grosses (57 percent of the total previously) to go the same way the movie's final global tally would be in the vicinity of $740 million, again a significant drop from what came before (Guardians of the Galaxy 2 a billion dollar hit in today's terms).

Moreover, it seems some analysts are even less optimistic about key parts of the picture. Deadline, which estimated a $130 million gross for the film's opening weekend not quite three weeks ago, now offers another estimate in the area of $110 million, which, apart from setting us up for still less on the basis of the same formulas I have used here (a Guardians movie taking in $290 million domestically, $670 million globally), in itself bespeaks the kind of falling expectations that preceded Thor 4's less-than-stellar performance last summer. Meanwhile I find myself thinking about Ant-Man 3's underwhelming performance, and how that was much more a matter of underperformance internationally rather than at home in North America. Where Ant-Man 3's box office slipped by a sixth domestically, it fell about half internationally in real terms. Were the drop for Guardians' international gross to be that much greater than its domestic drop (which already seems likely to be much sharper than the one Ant-Man 3 suffered, one-third rather than one-sixth, and maybe worse) it is not inconceivable that the international take could be that much weaker.

The result is that if a Guardians performance in the $700-$750 million range looks worrisome, worse still is quite conceivable. In the event of $290 million in North America, combined with an Ant-Man 3-like drop internationally, the movie might not see $600 million. Were the international drop, again, increased in severity, as the American drop increased in severity, the movie could see a good deal less than $600 million.

At this point it seems one could say something of potential profitability. Even with its reported $250 million budget Guardians 3 would not necessarily be a money-loser with a $700-$750 million gross. After all, Thor 4, budgeted at a similar level, if failing to cover its cost in its theatrical run, eventually brought in a $100 million cash-on-cash return thanks to characteristically healthy Marvel revenues from home entertainment/streaming/TV (and perhaps more still from merchandise, and from keeping the bigger-than-any-one-movie-or-series Marvel machinery grinding along). And there is for the time being no reason to think the profitability of a Guardians movie at that level would be worse. But it would likely be less than Disney-Marvel was hoping for from a Guardians of the Galaxy 3, the more in as it is a good deal less profit than it made from Guardians 2 ($190 million adjusted for today's terms, by my reckoning), continuing the pattern of falling profits (indeed, halved profits on its latest sequels relative to their predecessors, as seen with Thor 4 and Black Panther 2), and reaffirming the increasingly widespread view that Marvel's heyday is a thing of the past rather than proving the occasion on which the mega-franchise rallied and showed up the naysayers. Moreover, in 2023 it will not have a better chance than this one was, with the animated Spider-Man and the Kraven movies different sorts of projects, best judged by a different standard, and the only other comparable MCU movie The Marvels, which has been bumped from July all the way out to November.

I will have more to say of that film's chances--as well as Guardians' own prospects--as more data comes in.

* As always, I am using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index, in this case adjusting May 2017 prices for those of March 2023.

Estimating the Commercial Prospects of a Major Film: A Fuller View

Deadline's first "Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament" in three years, and its addition to and update of the ever-growing mass of data those Tournaments have produced, has had me rethinking my formula for estimating a movie's likely profitability from the more commonly publicized pieces of information (production budgets and box office grosses). Now it seems to me more useful to think less in terms of just the movie's succeeding or failing in its making its money back from the theatrical run than what that run portends more broadly--in what it can suggest about subsequent earnings from home entertainment, streaming, TV; and worthwhile to pay more heed to expenses that come after a movie is "finished" and out, like the "residuals and participations"; precisely because we have enough such data systematically collected to allow one to plausibly make some generalizations about them.

Of course, all that said, one should acknowledge the roughness of any such generalization. Apart from the vagueness of any numbers given us by the media (e.g. "Was that the cost of the production, or the net cost of the production?"), and the frank uncertainty (and even chicanery) associated with the calculations of accountants at the studios as in any other business (the words "There is no net" are a cliché for a reason), movies and their performances differ in all sorts of ways. Low-budget movies, as against high-budget movies, devote relatively less to production than to other expenses. (Saving money on a production does not make the cost of prints and ads any cheaper, especially if the movie is supposed to get a well-publicized wide release. Thus the total expenses on Where the Crawdads Sing ran to $123 million--even though the production itself cost a mere $24 million.) Movies that do less well in theaters tend to derive a higher share of their revenue from home entertainment/streaming/TV. (Crawdads, again, made some $120 million from the latter, as against just $68 million in theatrical rentals, so that they accounted for almost two-thirds of the total revenue in Deadline's analysis.) At a given level of earnings it makes a big difference what kind of deal the "talent" got, and whether the movie "underperformed" or "overperformed". (The fact that Top Gun 2 gave Tom Cruise a very generous contract to play Maverick Mitchell again, and then overperformed as it did, meant that participations alone came to an extraordinary $280 million--as against the $177 million actually spent on making the actual movie! Paramount's profit was still colossal--but this was a big bite out of the possible return on investment.)

All the same, crunching the numbers does afford one some meaningful averages that are at least a basis for good guesses--with this going all the more for the purposes of the kind of calculations I tend to here as my writing focuses on the likelihood that big-budget, blockbuster-type films lost money, broke even or turned in a profit rather than anything more precise. From that standpoint it seems to me reasonable to say that, when we count in the fuller outlay in the Deadline manner, a production budget (which in the absence of any information to the contrary I assume to be all net outlay to be on the safe side) is likely to represent no less than half and more likely a third of the total expense of the movie. At the same time the movie's theatrical rentals (40-50 percent of the gross, if usually closer to the 50 than the 40 mark) are commonly about 50 percent higher than what it will net the backer in home entertainment/streaming/TV (with Avenger vs. Thanos-caliber hits tending to do relatively less well because the box office take is so huge, while smaller earners, again, derive more of their money from the non-theatrical sources).

What does this work out to for, say, a $200 million production (like Ant-Man 3)? Going by the rules of thumb given here the fuller expenses will be upwards of $400 million, and likely in the vicinity of $600 million. With the movie needing to take in around 60 percent of that at the box office merely to let the later home entertainment options close the gap, at even the low end of the spectrum it would need something in the vicinity of $240 million in theatrical rentals simply to let a commonplace performance in home entertainment suffice to cover the remainder. That is to say, nothing less than $450 million at the box office is likely to do, while a half billion dollars or more are more likely to be required. At the high it would need $360 million, implying a gross in the area of $750 million at the least, and maybe even more like $900 million, again, just to break even, with worse quite possible (for instance, if a star's contract claims a significant share of the gross).

In that last "normal" year before the pandemic, 2019, maybe ten movies made $900 million--a fact that should remind us that, even where individual movies make colossal profits, the risks, and frequent losses, are likewise colossal, enough so that I wonder if the viability of this whole way of making and distributing movies is not increasingly in question.

Is Profitability Possible for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny?

Some time ago I made an estimate of how well (or poorly) Indiana Jones 5 is likely to do commercially based on the reported cost of the film, the grosses of prior films in the series, and the "headwinds" I saw the film facing (e.g. an aging fan base, waning nostalgia, skepticism in some quarters about a new director and Disney's oversight in the wake of a less than perfectly happy experience with Star Wars, etc.). My guess was a gross in the vicinity of a billion dollars, with a 25 percent margin up or down from that mark, with a performance below the billion dollar mark more likely than one much above it (and acknowledgment of a dim prospect of a Solo-like collapse). I also argued that given the reported $300 million cost of the movie (which according to my formula meant that the movie had to make 4-5 times that much to be assumed safely out of "flop" territory, and thus a $1.2 billion gross minimum, perhaps as much as a $1.5 billion gross necessary) this could easily leave the film making a loss--at least, as of the end of the theatrical run.

I see no reason to change any of that now.

Still, I do see some grounds for expanding on it. As my qualifier "as of the end of the theatrical run" indicates I did not concern myself with subsequent earnings--home entertainment, streaming, TV. However, crunching the recent Deadline numbers on twenty movies of 2022, which show pretty much the same picture in this respect as we had before the pandemic, it seems to me that one can say something of those home entertainment, etc., earnings, specifically that they tend to come to about two-thirds of what a movie took in theatrical rentals (the 40-50 percent of the gross the studio gets) in the case of big-budget films, which is to say that the final revenue averages roughly 60 percent theatrical, 40 percent from those other streams. It also seems that one can say something of the fuller expenses--like the costs of that release in those other media--which mean that the total expenses on a film commonly run three times the production budget these days (and sometimes more).

Going by the "production budget times three formula," and in the absence of information to the contrary the assumption that the $300 million production cost is the net figure, Disney-Lucasfilm may be spending up to $900 million on Indiana Jones altogether (a colossal but not unprecedented outlay). Going by the 60/40 theatrical/non-theatrical split, the movie would need some $500-$550 million in theatrical rentals--which means $1-$1.3 billion in box office gross--just to reduce the gap to be made up by the non-theatrical options to the proportions at which home entertainment and the rest could be expected to make it up. And this might be optimistic, given the role of participations and residuals here given that, after all, they brought Harrison Ford back to play Indiana Jones a fifth time.

The result is that, unless what we have heard about the production's costs are way off (and sometimes the expenditures do indeed turn out to be significantly less), it is easy to see the Indiana Jones film falling short of what it would need not only to make its money back in theaters, but to do so even with the help of post-theatrical revenue. A "mere" $750 million gross could leave the studio well into the red on this production, with the gap too big to be filled up by those other revenues. Of course, for all that the film may have some value to the franchise by keeping up interest in the older Jones films, moving associated merchandise, etc., but a bigger success would fulfill that object much more effectively than an underperforming Indiana Jones movie. And in the end there is a world of difference between merely minimizing one's losses, and enjoying the kind of roaring success that motivated Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm, and backing a big-budget Indiana Jones film.

Considering such a return on investment I find myself thinking of the trajectory of the blockbuster. Raiders of the Lost Ark, way back in 1981, cost what in today's terms would be some $60 million to make--a fifth what this movie has run--while the other associated expenses (e.g. publicity) were probably still smaller--while Indiana Jones 5 for all the extra investment, would be doing very well indeed to merely match its box office take (in today's terms, in the vicinity of $1.3 billion), which would still, even with the vastly enlarged home entertainment/streaming/TV income, just let it break even.

Just as with the historical epics and musicals that bloomed in the '50s, increasingly struggled in the '60s, and did not wholly survive that latter decade, the outlays have got to a point that makes vast investments to highly uncertain result the norm, so much so that just as with those genres I look at movies like this and think "This can't go on." But for the time being "this" is still going on, because at its level of capitalization, and facing the competition it does from those other media, Hollywood simply cannot go on in any other way.

Artificial Intelligence Enters Into Our Labor Disputes. (A Few Thoughts on the WGA Strike.)

I have written about the "writing life" from time to time--often out of exasperation at the nonsense about it which the media so often inflicts on us. (Indeed, I can think of no remotely contemporary depiction of that life that is even the least little bit as truthful as Balzac's Lost Illusions, or Jack London's Martin Eden.)

Most of the time I have for my subject writers of print fiction. However, the looming threat of a Writer's Guild of America (WGA) strike has brought renewed attention to the conditions in which those who write for the screen toil--which, like the conditions for working people in any other line, have not been improving. Quite the contrary, the WGA informed us in a bulletin this past March that those writers who are actually working are making less--in real, inflation-adjusted terms, almost a quarter (23 percent) less--than was the case a decade ago.

Where this process is concerned one can argue for "organic" changes in the market--like the rise of streaming--but it is also the case that the production companies and studios have fought bitterly to cut writers out of the gains.

In considering the situation it seems worth noting that the writers are up against businesses that, hardly genial to their workers in even the best of times, are very hard-pressed now--battered by the pandemic, and coming to grips with their earlier reckless spending on content as interest rates go up, compelling severe cuts in production. (Disney is a particularly conspicuous case, but Netflix, Warner Bros. and the rest are all doing the same. Remember how WBD buried a nearly complete Batgirl movie rather than put it out there?) The result is that they are even less likely than usual to be concilatory.

Of course, in post-Reagan America organized labor is not exactly known for winning fights with management. Indeed, had the WGA done better out of the last strike in 2007 writers would not have seen their wages collapse as they have. But collapse they did, leaving the matter of how writers are compensated for their work on streamed content--indeed, anything besides the network television we are always told is in a state of advanced decline--unacceptable, as they look ahead to still more radical changes. In coverage of the issue we are seeing reference to how artificial intelligence as such will fit into the picture, not too unreasonably given what some think it may be doing before even a three year contract runs its course. After all, even if the time when a chatbot could crank out whole ready-for-filming scripts of even mediocre quality seems still some way off, its merely producing something a script editor can fix up into something passable would be plenty to reduce the demand for writers--and the bargaining position of those who still land work. Indeed I would not be surprised to find that the studios are already quietly trying to make it happen.

The result is that, as one anonymous member of the Guild said, "We're looking at the extinction of writing as a profession." Should the Guild actually act in accordance with that thinking this might be a long, grueling contest such as Hollywood has not seen in a very, very long time. That seems unlikely to have much of an immediate effect on the saturated media consumer just yet, but it may be a sign of things to come as artificial intelligence as such increasingly enters into the disputes of labor with management.

The Profitability of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Phase Three--and Afterward

Taken together Deadline's lists of the most profitable movies of the year from 2015 on give those of us who are not studio insiders a better-than-usual picture of the economics of the blockbuster because they go beyond production budgets and box office grosses to a fuller accounting of costs and revenues, at least at the top of the market. In the process they give us a fairly good picture of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's commercial performance, precisely because it has been so prominent at the top, with this going in particular for Phase Three--ten of the MCU's eleven third phase films making Deadline's lists, which is to say, all but Ant-Man 2 (an omission unlikely to skew the picture very much even if we had the numbers, given its lower cost and lower earnings).

Going by Deadline's numbers Disney-Marvel expended some $5.6 billion on the ten films listed here, counting everything from production, to prints and ads, to overhead and interest, to video costs, to participations and residuals. Beyond those expenses it made some $3.5 billion from theatrical rentals, home entertainment, streaming/TV--a better than sixty percent "cash-on-cash" return for the lot. Granted, this was money in yesteryear's prices spread out in rather uneven fashion over many years, but making some account of inflation it seems to me that we still have a $7 billion or so outlay in March 2023 dollars, and over $4 billion in earnings above that outlay, not changing the proportions much.*

All of this only underlines what a force to be reckoned with the MCU was at its height, commercially speaking. Of course, this was disproportionately due to the two-part Avengers battle with Thanos, which took in $1.4 billion in estimated profit in 2018-2019 (and $1.7 billion in real terms in today's dollars), but even without them I calculate the average for the other non-Avengers movies discussed here as (helped by the particular successes of Spider-Man: Far From Home, Black Panther and Captain Marvel) in the vicinity of $275 million in today's terms (and even the weaker Ant-Man 2 unlikely to drag this down much were it included).

The result is a very high standard of profitability indeed--the kind that no reasonable person can expect to see go on for any franchise for very long, and which Disney especially should not have expected to see go on forever given its experience with Star Wars--in which Episode VII made over a $900 million profit, and then Solo made a $77 million (or even worse) loss just two-and-a-half years later, a literal billion dollar drop in returns.

The MCU has yet to have its Solo, of course, and I am not sure that it will, the MCU perhaps too big for even a failure that severe and that unambiguous to stop in its tracks (especially so long as the films bring viewers to Disney's streaming service, and help to keep MCU merchandise selling). All the same, this puts into perspective the performance of its most recent movies. Thor 4 and Black Panther 2 were still money-makers, but brought in just half the profit their predecessors did, while looking at Ant-Man 3's theatrical performance it seems possible that it might barely break even, or lose a little money, even with the home entertainment-type revenue counted in, while the upcoming releases of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and The Marvels may be up against significant headwinds, and any Avengers vs. Thanos-caliber event, or even Spider-Man: No Way Home-caliber event, looking a long way off as of April 2023.

The fact matters the more because even if this is cause for anxiety rather than full-blown disaster, Disney faces so many problems on so many different fronts. The company is now coping not just with the hole in its balance sheet made not just by the pandemic (which took a toll on its movies like everyone else's), but also reckless overspending on for-streaming content (admittedly a problem everyone else had), the shaky results of its investment in Lucasfilm as of late (with Indiana Jones 5 not a sure winner and the plans for the Star Wars franchise on the big screen remaining unsettled year in, year out), and the massive losses in its original mainstay of animation (with Strange World and Lightyear together losing the studio over $300 million all by themselves, on top of the money almost certainly lost by the hugely expense yet straight-to-streaming Turning Red). All of that means that it really, really needs wins here, and these are getting to be fewer and smaller.

* I adjusted the figures by converting the figures’ value in the month of the movie’s release for March 2023 prices using the Consumer Price Index and got $6.7 billion in costs, $4.1 billion in return-on-cash--a method that seemed sufficiently rough to merit rounding to the nearest billion to be on the safe side.

Beyond Ticket Sales: What Movies Make From Streaming and Television

Having long been aware that theatrical release is only part of how a film makes back the money put into them, when I offer my estimates of "hit" and "flop," money-maker and money-loser, I try to emphasize that I am only assessing the economics of the theatrical release, and not the overall performance. This is partly because important as the box office is in itself, and indicative as it tends to be of the broader outcome (it is generally the theatrical hit that makes the most in home entertainment, and merchandising, and vice-versa), it is not everything, with the figures on home entertainment and the like that tend to be less available sometimes making an important difference.

As it happens Deadline's "Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament" of many years now has given us a far from comprehensive but still noteworthy base of information for judging film earnings from home entertainment options like streaming and television--indeed, one plausibly useful enough that it seems to me that some generalization about how this works these days is possible. Going by the data it collected for 2015-2019 in reasonably consistent fashion, with the pattern of which Deadline's figures for 2022 seem broadly consistent, it seems that the ten or so most profitable "blockbusters" of the year make about 57 percent of their net earnings from theaters, 43 percent from the home entertainment/streaming/TV options. The biggest hits in theaters tend to make the most money from the other sources, too, but they still tend to make relatively more of their net from theaters, the lower earners relatively less. Thus Avengers 3 and 4 picked up two-thirds of their money theatrically, Avatar 2 almost four-fifths of its money in theaters at last check, while the horror hit Smile made less than half there, and Strange World not much more than a quarter.

The last of these films verifies the principle that the theatrical release is usually the key indicator. That Strange World made via home entertainment, TV, streaming three times what it did from theatrical releases did not save it from being the worst flop of the year, leaving Disney "another $200 million in the red..)

All the same, there are sometimes significant surprises, with Black Panther 2 a case in point. Its $325 million from home entertainment, television, streaming made the difference between its barely breaking even, or losing money (its theatrical run was not unjustly seen as a disappointment), and its being one of the most profitable big movies of 2022.

The Profitability of Thor 4: A Note

When Thor 4 came out expectations were high for the film, some thinking that this Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) franchise that tends to play more like a Guardians of the Galaxy movie than an Avengers movie was going to break into a higher tier of moneymaker. This was not wholly unreasonable. after all, each Thor movie had made more than the last, with the process gone far enough that in 2022 terms Thor 3 (Thor: Ragnarok) was a billion dollar hit--its $854 million in late 2017 about $1.025 billion in summer 2022 prices. However, pulling in a mere $761 million Thor 4 actually made less in nominal terms, and a quarter less in real terms (with the fact only partially attributable to Marvel's shutout from China), and that result quite naturally received as a letdown.* Indeed, the suspicion that the movie failed to break even on its theatrical run would seem to be justified by the numbers Deadline published this month--the theatrical run bringing in $350 million, as against the $455 million spent on the production, prints and ads, and overhead and interest, while participations and residuals also had to be paid (these eventually totaling another $57 million).

Of course, there was home entertainment and streaming/TV, which came close to matching the theatrical run's earnings with another $300 million. The result was that Thor 4 still ended up with a respectable profit of $103 million.

Still, it seems worth noting that just as with Black Panther 2 this meant a halving of the profit from the last entry in the series in real terms, Thor 3 having made a profit of $174 million back in 2017 according to the same formula (which worked out to about $209 million at the time Thor 4 came out).

It is not the direction in which Disney-Marvel needed the numbers to move, in either case. Indeed, if the numbers keep moving in this direction, profitability quickly becomes nonexistent. Yet with $100 million more made than what was spent it is no franchise-killer.

* Thor 3 made about $112 million in China--about $135 million in summer 2022 terms, such that even without it, merely matching Thor 3 in the rest of the world the movie should have made about $890 million. Putting it another way, the film's non-Chinese gross dropped about 14 percent from the last Thor movie, in contrast with the increases previously seen.

2022's Where the Crawdads Sing at the Box Office

Delia Owens' novel Where the Crawdads Sing was a colossal bestseller, lasting for over three years on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. Predictably made into a film, that movie was released in the summer of 2022.

Compared with similarly successful bestsellers made into major movies--The Da Vinci Code, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey--this adaptation’s run in theaters seemed relatively low profile, Crawdads, in what, a very few exceptions apart (Avatar 2, Top Gun 2) was a less than booming year, failed to crack the long-since inflated $100 million barrier and finished behind such "underperforming" films as Elvis, Nope and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore at the North American box office (while doing still less well internationally).

However, according to Deadline it actually proved to be one of the more profitable films of the year, earning nearly $200 million on an outlay of $123 million (only a fifth of which was spent on the actual production) for a 61 percent "cash-on-cash return."

In doing so Crawdads was that rarity of recent years, a film made for a relatively small amount of money that--even without being a horror film or an arty critic's darling that gets heavily promoted to a wider audience (the film seems to have been as disliked by critics as it was liked by its viewers)--managed to sell millions of tickets. The result is an undeniable hit on a smaller scale (making a little less than the ill-fated Fantastic Beasts 3, but costing only a small fraction of what that movie did, so that it came out far ahead by this metric).

All the same, successful as the film was--and important the book's built-in audience was to making it a success--I find myself wondering if the modest scale of that success is not in its way suggestive of books mattering less in contemporary culture than they did just a short time earlier.

"Is Black Panther 2 a Commercial Failure?" My Last Word on the Subject (Probably)

Back when Black Panther 2 hit theaters I took up the question of the movie's commercial performance raising the possibility that given the reports of its budget (we heard figures like $250 million tossed about), the movie was not going to make back its cost in theatrical release, even as I allowed that other revenue streams could compensate.

Deadline's recent figures suggest this thinking was not far off the mark. The backers of the movie spent some $376 million on production, prints and ads, and overhead and interest, even before participations and residuals came into the picture--which eventually came to another $60 million.

By contrast the studio made $425 million off of theatrical rentals.

The result was that, judged on even the most optimistic accounting, the film only really began to make money when non-theatrical revenue streams were counted in. Of course, when they are counted in the result is clearly a healthy profit--enough for Deadline to rank the film as one of 2022's most profitable blockbusters. Still, this is not the performance Disney-Marvel probably hoped for. (Top Gun 2, and even the far more costly Avatar 2, were profitable long before the end of their theatrical runs.)

The gap between anticipations and results is especially evident when one compares Black Panther 2 to the original Black Panther. That movie, according to the same formula, was almost twice as profitable--bringing in some $476 million in profit, as against the $259 million the sequel brought in. Adjusting the figures for inflation makes the original Black Panther look better still--its $476 million in 2018 equal to about $570 million at the time of Black Panther 2's release. This leaves the second film's mass of profit less than half that of the first film, and the margin of profitability, more or less, commensurately smaller (a "cash-on-cash" return of some 53 percent for the sequel, as against 92 percent for the original). The result is that if Disney eventually made money, a good bit of it, the result still bespeaks a path of diminishing returns that may not exactly have them rushing to green-light Black Panther 3--the more in as Black Panther 2 was scarcely out of theaters before Ant-Man 3 flopped in a manner that could leave it a money-loser, even with home entertainment and the rest going some way to making up the shortfall.

The result is that, while any movie that brings in a fifty percent profit on such a colossal outlay is absolutely no flop, it was very far from being an unmitigated success--the word "disappointment" likely not inappropriate. Meanwhile, beyond Black Panther 2 it seems to say a lot that even with streaming proving no substitute for the box office (as the retreat from high spending on for-streaming content reminds us) movies are now routinely budgeted at such a level that even movies ranking among the biggest hits fail to make back their money from ticket-buyers alone. One can take it as suggestive of the decadence of the blockbuster model, just like what we had with musicals in the ‘60s--with no successor in sight.

Deadline's List of the Most Profitable Films of 2022: Some Thoughts

Not long ago I offered some comment on Deadline's report on the most unprofitable films of 2022, as calculated not simply on the basis of production budget vs. box office, but more comprehensive information on expenditure and revenue.

It seems to me that there is also something to be said about the most profitable films, on which it also reported, presenting two lists of them--one comprised of the most profitable "blockbusters" (high-budget, high-profile, high-grossing movies) and of films overall (with the latter, going by relative profitability, more inclusive of smaller films that brought in more money in relation to their cost, even when the mass of profit was much less than that brought in by the blockbusters).

Where the blockbusters were concerned I was completely unsurprised to see Avatar 2 at the top, followed by Top Gun 2. Colossal as the investment in Avatar 2 was, so was its gross--while in the wake of James Cameron's remarks foregrounding the issue of what the film had to make in order to "break even" the entertainment press happened to note, and report, that the movie entered the territory of profitability somewhere around the $1.5 billion mark (!), after which the movie kept on making money until it hit $2.3 billion (a lot less than the original Avatar, especially in real terms, but all the same, so much that any question of disappointment is completely unreasonable). Meanwhile Top Gun 2 went far, far above and beyond expectations in such a way that its inclusion here was no less predictable. I was unsurprised to see Minions: The Rise of Gru in the #3 spot given how well it did--a comparative bright spot in what, Top Gun 2's success apart, was not exactly an impressive summer commercially.

By contrast I was more surprised to see Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2 on the list, given that, while one expects Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) superhero movies here, and they were indeed major moneymakers by the usual standard (bringing in a combined $1.8 billion in ticket sales), there were perceptions that their grosses were not all that had been hoped for (which I argued for myself). Still, if they could have done better at the box office they were still solid earners from the standpoint of the bigger picture, at least--and reminders that if the MCU, like so many other huge franchises (James Bond, Star Wars), has passed its peak it remains a long way from being so unviable as to be given up (even if, in the wake of the disappointment of Ant-Man 3, that day may not be so far off as it seemed even a little while ago).

Meanwhile the more inclusive, relative profit-minded list of most profitable films was predictably dominated by horror films (the reboot of Scream, Black Phone, M3GAN--the latter counted as "2022" mainly because the Deadline people wanted it to be, I suppose), for if horror movies are no match for the superhero epics at the box office they still offer enough return on a low budget to be worth putting out theatrically. The two exceptions to the pattern were Where the Crawdads Sing and Everything Everywhere All at Once--the one benefiting from the colossal bestsellerdom of the book it adapted and the built-in audience it brought, while the other was one of those arthouse-type movies that end up reaching a broader audience (helped, I think, by its blockbuster-ish elements--the movie being a martial arts battle across the multiverse).

In short, as much as the blockbusters even the smaller hits have been just as predictable as the big. Indeed, as other hits, and misses, of the year indicate, the range of material that stands a chance of successful theatrical release is ever narrower, and deviation from that narrowness ever less forgiven by the Market.

Han Solo and Captain Kirk in Tom Clancy's Star Wars: Revisiting Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin as it Might Have Been.

Recently revisiting the matter of the ultimately failed attempt to make a film adaptation of Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin back in the 1990s I was reminded of the involvement of William Shatner in the production--and of course, struck by how a movie about "Star Wars" which brings together "Han Solo" and "Captain Kirk" can seem replete with metafictional possibilities to the point of their overshadowing everything else.

Of course, there was some precedent for a big Harrison Ford-starring action movie series having something comparable without its dominating everything. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had “James Bond” as Indiana Jones' father--as he was in a creative sense. Not only was it the case that the James Bond films paved the way for later high-concept action-adventure blockbuster filmmaking in a broad way. George Lucas himself constantly cited the Bond films not only as predecessor but inspiration, such that he would reference it when making his early sales pitches to the studios about the kind of movie he meant to make when he was trying to get Star Wars into production, with this apparently carrying over to Dr. Jones. (After all, he offered Steven Spielberg the idea specifically because he fancied a chance to direct a Bond movie that was simply not forthcoming in those days.*)

Still, I am not sure to what extent the broad public has been attentive to this. Indeed, I have been struck by how those writing the history of the making of Star Wars, and the broader rise of the blockbuster, both those favorably and unfavorably disposed toward the film and its associated franchise, cut the precedent of James Bond out of the picture, such that the general viewers were, if anything, less likely to see very much in "James Bond" and "Indiana Jones" being in a movie together.

One might add that, if they had hardly forgotten that Sean Connery was James Bond once upon a time (indeed, before the pretense that the rebooted films are the only ones that count, Connery was in fact remembered as the best of them), he appeared here as being as un-Bondian figure as one could imagine, a tweedy old professor of Medieval literature very much out of his element when shooting it out with the Nazis. (One can add that, at least according to Joseph McBride's biography of Spielberg, Spielberg got squeamish about keeping the bit about the elder Jones' affair with Elsa Schneider, and only Connery's insistence saw it retained--about which McBride quotes Connery remarking that he "didn't want [Henry Jones Sr.] to be such a wimp.")

It helped that Connery, more than most figures who get to be so associated with a major franchise, managed to make a name for himself beyond and after that franchise, with at the time of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade's release in 1989 Connery having starred in a long string of major non-Bond films, many well-received critically and successful commercially (like The Wind and the Lion, or Robin and Marian), or otherwise making their mark (like the oddity that is Zardoz, or the cult hit Highlander, or the ambitious misfire that was The Name of the Rose). Indeed, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar just two years earlier for his performance in The Untouchables, which was likely far fresher in viewers' minds than his run as Bond, which, the merely middling success of Never Say Never Again six years earlier apart, ended in 1971--all as, arguably, the cachet of the Bond series was at something of a low point (as we saw when Licence to Kill proved that franchise's biggest-ever flop that same summer), with all that implies for how much anyone would have thought about it.

Altogether, while it was quite possible to see James Bond-as-Indiana-Jones'-father as a sort of inside joke that did not make very much difference to most, and certainly did not turn the movie into a joke.

By contrast, it is almost impossible to see William Shatner and not think of . . . Captain Kirk, the more in as between TV, film and video gaming he not only played the character for at least four decades (which made the more impression because of Shatner's infamous impression on screen--the highly theatrical line delivery with its entirely ungrammatical dramatic pauses, the self-deprecating sense of humor), but how he has so strongly associated himself with that figure. Thus did we see William Shatner officially playing himself over and over again in episodes and even films where he appeared precisely because he had been Captain Kirk (as in 1998's indie film Swingers-for-Star Trek fans, Free Enterprise), while even when not officially playing himself he was apt to be playing off of the association with Captain Kirk somehow--all as, in his numerous non-acting public appearances, he never let us forget the connection, not least by writing, directing and starring in the documentary The Captains (2011), which is about his interviews with the other five Star Trek captains of the small and large screens. A different attitude from Connery's relationship to James Bond is harder to imagine, and depending on just how big Shatner's part would have been in the Cardinal movie it would likely have been much more remarked, and much more consequential for the viewing experience--such that looking back at this ‘90s-era idea one can only wonder, "Just what is the deal with that?"

* These days the Bond franchise's runners love hiring big-name auteur directors from all over the place to helm the movies (Marc Foster, Sam Mendes, Cary Joji Fukunaga), but back then they were a "creative producer's" show (specifically Albert R. Broccoli's show), with the directors local Brits who had often worked in prior Bond films in lower-level functions. John Glen, who helmed the five '80s-era EON Bond films (For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill), had been with the franchise since the '60s, working as editor and second unit director on On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker before getting the job.

About That The Cardinal of the Kremlin Movie They Never Made . . .

Considering the reports of plans for a Debt of Honor movie I find myself thinking more about those Ryanverse projects that never came to pass--like that literal generation-long effort to make a Without Remorse movie before the Michael B. Jordan-starring effort made it to Amazon streaming (like the version that John Milius was getting together back in the '90s), and of course, what would have been the third Harrison Ford-starring Jack Ryan movie, The Cardinal of the Kremlin. I remembered hearing about it back in the '90s, but the next Ryan movie we actually got was The Sum of All Fears with a younger Ryan played by Ben Affleck, and that was that, everyone seeming to move on, with, so far as I know not much about the development process for the Cardinal movie ever being made public. Interestingly, though, Wikipedia does report (though I have not so far traced the actual origin of the claim) that the reason Mace Neufeld (producer of all five of the Ryanverse feature films released in 1990-2015) moved on to Sum of All Fears was that Cardinal of the Kremlin ultimately proved too difficult to adapt. This seems to me extremely plausible, frankly, with three particular reasons coming to mind:

1. The story the book tells dated very quickly and very severely. Apart from The Hunt for Red October The Cardinal of the Kremlin was Clancy's most Cold War-steeped story, and in many ways less adjustable than any of his other as yet unfilmed Ryanverse books. Where Patriot Games presented a distinctly Cold War vision of international terrorism in the early '90s the Irish Republican Army was still topical enough for a movie like this (indeed, a few years on Harrison Ford would get caught up with the IRA again in 1997's The Devil's Own). The same also went for Colombian drug cartels when Clear and Present Danger hit the screen in 1994. By contrast, Cardinal focused on the then-popular topic of the American-Soviet race to develop strategic defenses, while also prominently featuring the war in Afghanistan (in which it demonized the Soviets and lionized the tribal-fundamentalist rebels fighting them), and also had plenty of good old-fashioned Cold War-vintage "tradecraft" of the dead drops-and-tails variety. There was just no pretending that all of this was happening in the '90s. Meanwhile some of what was passed off as plausible in the near future in the '80s was looking ever-more silly--not least the claims made for the imminence of dramatic breakthroughs in strategic defense and its associated technologies. (In Clancy's book--just as you saw dramatized in, for instance, the 1985 comedy Spies Like Us--the expectation was of colossal ground-based laser cannons bouncing their laser beams off of constellations of giant orbiting mirrors to almost instantly zap missiles launching on the other side of the planet.) The result was that a Cardinal of the Kremlin movie’s simply presenting a title card that tells us this all secretly happened a few years earlier would seem a lot less passable. And if you cut all this out there is just not much left.

2. The story of Cardinal is exceptionally diffuse--even by Tom Clancy's standards. While even the early "Jack Ryan" novels were generally sprawling, big-picture narratives where Ryan himself was often not present for most of the book (even in The Hunt for Red October the scenes he is actually in comprise just a third of the book) Clancy typically drew the multiple threads of his narratives together in time, space and action to give us a recognizable climax, and put Ryan where the action was, so that he could do something action-heroic enough to justify his “hero-protagonist” status. Thus, even as the Cold War crisis swirled across the North Atlantic, complete with bits like F-14s engaging Soviet fighters from the Kiev and A-10s buzzing a Kirov-class cruiser. (That this scene, only loosely connected with Ryan's action, strictly speaking inessential, and all about the equipment, was reportedly Clancy’s favorite, says a lot about the big picture, technical detail-oriented character of his writing.) Indeed, Ryan himself disappeared from view for long stretches (in the paperback edition you miss him for a hundred pages). Still, Ryan is the one who has the all-important realization that Marko Ramius was indeed defecting, and then contrives to get out to his submarine to personally conduct him westwards, aboard which he even shoots it out with a KGB agent aboard the vessel to “save the day.” In Patriot Games there was the showdown with the vengeful terrorists at his home. And in Clear and Present Danger he not only saw the special forces team that the conniving D.C. bureaucrats abandoned in Colombia extracted, but when the rescue helicopter went in Ryan flew in aboard it, manning a minigun with which he helped fight off attacking drug cartel soldiers. Alas, this does not happen in Cardinal of the Kremlin, where instead the "climax" is more like a "climactic patch" of acts widely separated geographically and in specific intent (a Hostage Rescue team action to rescue a scientist kidnapped by the KGB, a submarine-based infiltration of Cardinal to extricate a defector's family, a raid by Afghan rebels across the Soviet border to wreak havoc on a missile defense research site, etc.). Putting it another way, rather than the threads coming together, Clancy wrapped up the threads separately, their only connection even at the close the broader superpower competition that is the book's concern. And as if that were not enough Ryan is not even physically near the more action movie-type stuff, with his bit in his own part of things fairly un-action hero-like in comparison with the gunplay and other feats of the other books. As a fairly forgiving reader of this kind of narrative I thought it passable, but the hard fact of the matter is that this simply will not work as the big finish of a major feature film, and transforming the narrative into something that will satisfy would, again, change the material out of all recognition.

3. Where, again, the diffuseness of the story of Cardinal makes it hard to say just how much or how little it would have mattered, the story included an element that in the '90s was already looking troublesome, namely a traitor within the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative who was a lesbian, and indeed initiated such a relationship with another character whom she betrayed in the process. That was already enough to cause a backlash (as that other '90s hit, Basic Instinct, showed.)--while the fires of "culture war" were burning ever-hotter, and Clancy, if not so freely expressing his opinions as he would in later books, was still a well-known political conservative in the social as well as other spheres. Some people would be very mad indeed if that element of the plot was left in, while other people would also get mad if it was cut out--and accuse the producers of "caving in" to "political correctness." (Indeed, it would be interesting to know if this particular aspect of the story came up in that failed adaptation process of which we know so little--and what Clancy had to say about it.)

Moreover, great as all of these difficulties already were in the ‘90s they only became greater in the years after, with the Cold War increasingly remote (it was not long before young people didn’t even know what it was); with perceptions of Afghanistan and its recent history changing radically in the U.S. in ways very awkward for proponents of the Cold Warrior/neoconservative perspective in particular; with the blockbuster taking on ever more stereotyped and bombastic form into which any unconventionality of structure required for a recognizable adaptation of Clancy’s tale was ever less likely to fit; and politics just went on becoming ever more sensitized to and obsessed with popular culture, such that it could quickly have got to be "too hot to handle." Still, I do wonder about one detail of the film that was reported at the time--namely that the movie would have seen Harrison Ford teamed up with William Shatner. I very much doubt that even in that decade in which pop culture so often choked on its own irony the backers of the movie had any intention of making a Jack Ryan tale as an action-comedy (I just can’t see Clancy agreeing to this)--but the idea of a movie about "Star Wars" starring Han Solo and Captain Kirk together could still have been something memorable that way.*

Or at least, given us the makings of a really great Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode.

Is Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor Even Filmable Today?

Even in the 1980s, when Clancy was the bestselling writer in the country Hollywood was skeptical about the salability of a film based on the material given the problems of translating it to the screen, and the changing political context. This was not wholly without reason. In spite of Clancy's insistence that he has a "very visual style," what he offers are information-heavy, mostly "tell don't show" thrillers that leave much of their interest behind in any attempt at conversion into a series of images per the literary ideal of Gustave Flaubert. (When it comes to the technology, we just get the big external effects, not the subtleties, with screen-based storytelling. Someone pushes a button, something explodes--we don't know much else. Alas, much of the interest of a Tom Clancy novel lies in its enabling us to understand the "much else.") The narratives also tend to be sprawling in such a way as to guarantee massive paring down into a two-hour film which keeps the protagonist mostly on screen. Moreover, the Cold War in which his books were rooted drew to a close far faster than mainstream observers imagined, with The Hunt for Red October--the rights to which were actually purchased in 1984 when the book was still in galley form, before it hit print, before its run as a bestseller--appearing on screen only in February 1990, with the Berlin Wall down and the Warsaw Pact passing out of existence (compelling the filmmakers' to casually backdate events to November 1984).

As it happened, the movie, if not necessarily translating everything that drew readers to Clancy's novels (given the above, I doubt any popular movie can), still worked well enough as a thriller to be a box office hit, and spawn two big-screen sequels in a mere four years' time. However, it is notable that after moving from Red October to its prequel Patriot Games, the producers then overleaped the next book in the sequence, the Cold War-rooted The Cardinal of the Kremlin, to seize on the more topical Clear and Present Danger--and then when trying with Cardinal afterward failed to make it work.

It was a reminder then that the scenarios with which Clancy worked--quite naturally, given the "ripped from the headlines" or "tomorrow's headline today" interest of the techno-thriller genre--tends to date fast, with 2023 seeing not only the Cold War dated, but the "post-Cold War" too, to which Debt of Honor most certainly belonged. Here, the corpse of the Soviet Union was barely cold, and Japan was looking like possibly America's next geopolitical rival, the more in as so many national loyalties were in flux, with the tale seeing the U.S. and Japan fight a war as the U.S. Navy gets in a confrontation with the fleet of an India that, like China, is secretly aligned with it. I might add that rather than this being a one-novel premise it was the start of a three-book arc that saw the U.S. confront, and defeat, the three Asian powers, as well as an expansionist Iran-Iraq, all which climaxed with a NATO-China battle in 2000's The Bear and the Dragon that ultimately saw the West embrace Russia as a fellow NATO member and (as is usually the case in this kind of World War III fantasy) the enemy regime collapse, putting another nail in the coffin of Communism and locking in the era of cheerfully globalizing unipolarity so taken for granted then as the only foreseeable future.

Today mainstream opinion, however, far from fearing what Japan might do there is more concern about what it might not do--the American press hailing Japanese rearmament for the sake of contributing to the balance of the U.S.-led alliance, while India is aligned with the U.S. against China rather than the other way around (to the point that it had the benefit of American satellite imagery in real-time in the latest Indo-Chinese border clash, which are "a thing" again), all as Russia, and China, are discussed together in such terms that one would think Nixon had never made his proverbial trip. (Oh, and by the way that Iran-Iraq combination occurred in Clancy's book because Iran had a deep-cover agent in Saddam Hussein's circle who killed him, opening the way for the union of the two countries, in stark contrast with the events of our own timeline.)

Indeed, at this point, as history repeats itself in the form of a farce that could nonetheless end as tragedy, I suspect that amid the current "neo-Cold War" mood The Cardinal of the Kremlin scenario that looked so dated in the '90s now actually looks less dated than the later Debt of Honor does. And as if all that were not enough, there is the book's big twist, namely the circumstances which see Jack Ryan--National Security Adviser at the book's start--catapulted to the Presidency by the tale's last page. At the time they were received as silly thriller stuff but they can now appear redolent with echoes of twenty-first century American traumas (a vengeful foreigner hijacking an airliner and using it to attack Washington D.C., an attack on the Capitol during the rituals of presidential succession) in a manner that will very easily rub everyone the wrong way if treated as just "silly thriller stuff."

But cut that out and you will have very little left--and Hollywood knows it, which is why Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and the Jack Ryan TV series used brand-new scenarios rather than anything Clancy wrote, while Without Remorse was profoundly changed (the story brought up fifty years, with the organized crime and Vietnam POW themes abandoned in favor of Syria, Russia and a Beltway conspiracy). In all this I am reminded of the prolific adaptation of another writer--Ian Fleming. While the '60s-era Bond films, if far from perfectly faithful to the source material, at least incorporated a good deal of it, by the time of 1977's The Spy Who Loved Me there was nearly nothing left of Fleming's novels but the title when they hit the screen. So is it likely to go with any Debt of Honor movie that does happen, any agonizing over how they will "update" the plot pointless.

Adapting Tom Clancy

Today Tom Clancy is such a multimedia success--indeed, so known by his success in media (video gaming, television, film) outside the one in which he began (print)--that it is easy to forget just how unlikely his becoming so seemed in the '80s, even when he was topping the bestseller list. Where all that is concerned it is worth recalling the Los Angeles Times' article about the challenge Clancy and Hollywood collaborators of his such as Mace Neufeld and John Milius faced getting the Jack Ryan franchise going.

While I have never had a high estimate of the average level of intelligence in Hollywood, and especially its studio executives, reading this article it seems to me that, as the article conveys it, they at least understood the difficulties of translating Clancy’s material into a hit film pretty. Besides the very understandable, and ultimately correct, sense that the Cold War was waning with all that implied for the interest of such stories, which did indeed start to plummet with the fall of the Berlin Wall as the bestseller lists show , there was the sheer scale of the stories--the author of the article noting that the studios recognized that Red Storm Rising could be the basis of a mini-series (and a lavish one at that), but not a movie, while the same tendency was evident, if in lesser degree, in most of the Jack Ryan books, if one tried to be at all faithful to their scope and intricacy. There was the extent to which much of what made the books interesting to their readers could not be incorporated into any screen action story--the intricate construction of the narrative out of numerous threads, subplots, viewpoint characters that would get cut down for any two-hour film, all the technical detail that would fall by the wayside as, rendered visually rather than by way of the written word, it just becomes people looking at screens and pushing buttons and things exploding. And just as translation to the screen would likely discard their strengths it would highlight their weaknesses--along with the diffuseness of those narratives, their emotional slightness. To use the Goethe-Schiller conception, these narratives are "epic" rather than "dramatic," and conventionally it is the dramatic that filmmakers endeavor to offer. (Even action movies tell us that "This time, it's personal"--even if only because someone killed the hero's favorite second cousin, and that's a big mistake, and, and save for Patriot Games, which was in its way the least Clancy-ish of the early novels, there was just not much of that driving Ryan's actions, at least.)

There was also what it would all cost.

In the period when Hollywood was first thinking about making films out of Clancy's work it was still common for the studios to fund major summer releases--a Commando, an Aliens, a Robocop, a Lethal Weapon--at $10-$20 million, a sum that, even adjusted for inflation, still seems paltry today, some $30-$60 million, as against the $150 million and up, often way up, expected today. (Indeed, by today's standard they fall into that middle range which is too expensive for little indies, but too small for the tastes of most backers.) This was a long way from being enough to make a film version of The Hunt for Red October look credible on the big screen.

So what happened? Well, if it took longer than many hoped Clancy was a sufficiently big phenomenon, apparently with enough sympathy from Hollywood's "players," for The Hunt for Red October to get its chance, Paramount making the movie with a blockbuster budget and getting it into theaters in February 1990. That was not a typical release date for a blockbuster, but it meant that the Cold War, if already fast passing (the Berlin Wall came down four months earlier), remained a strong enough presence for a little backdating to suffice at smoothing over its rapid obsolescence (the story presented as a bit of secret history taken place in November 1984 rather than a contemporary tale). It was also the case that there was just not much box office competition for a movie like this at the time (since Hollywood hadn't yet made summer movies play all year long).

The movie was not just a hit, but the fifth-highest grossing movie of the year (notably outdoing such highly anticipated summer action movies as Die Hard 2 and Total Recall), and sequels followed in due course, two in a mere four years (Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), all as other techno-thrillers filled up the screen--movies like Under Siege, and Crimson Tide, and Broken Arrow, and Executive Decision, and Air Force One, extending and encouraging the fashion, which I think happened because of several ongoing developments that may have played a part in getting Red October made in the first place. By and large this was a matter of the scaling up of the action movie, which meant that if $10-$20 million got you a summer move in the mid-'80s even a couple of years later studios expected to, and did, lay out much more--$50 million budgets becoming the norm by 1989 with films like Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 3. There was, too, a detectable sense that the '80s-era approach to such movies was not working so well as before, that making them "go bigger" was not making them better--as one sees in the over-the-top quality of, for example, Rambo III, or Tango & Cash, or Die Hard 2, all of which have their fans but all of which some saw as just "too much," and which did not make so much more money than their predecessors as to justify the extra money sunk into them. (Rambo III, in fact, left that franchise moribund for years, while Tango & Cash and Die Hard 2 were also seen as not all that had been hoped for.) However, the techno-thriller with its military hardware and geopolitical plots seemed to leave some room for usefully “going bigger.” And so it went for a while, until Hollywood ran short on conveniently adaptable material (The Cardinal of the Kremlin was not easy to work with, Red Storm Rising a non-starter, the side story of Without Remorse a tricky proposition, etc.), Clancy's star sank, and the action movie was increasingly colonized by "still bigger" sci-fi themes anyway. Armageddon was the champion in the summer of 1998, the return of Star Wars to the screen the champion in 1999, while if it did not dominate the year the comparative success of the first X-Men initiated a renewed fashion for big-budget, first-string superhero films that made the successes of Superman in 1978 and Batman in 1989 look like flashes in the pan, the boom really getting going now--while we are still there, as Jack Ryan thrillers, far from representing the scaling up of the blockbuster, have come to seem comparatively limited productions, with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and Without Remorse no head-liners, and for the time being Ryan most successful in a streaming TV series. Of course, we now hear reports of Debt of Honor being made as a feature film--but any attempt to render it faithfully will pit the writers against perhaps insuperable obstacles as they face a different generation's challenges in producing a satisfactory adaptation of his material.