Mission: Impossible 7's Third Weekend at the Box Office

NOTE: I wrote this just after Mission: Impossible 7's third weekend at the box office (July 28-July 30), but was unable to post it at the time. I decided to go ahead and put it up anyway for what it is worth.

Last week Boxoffice Pro estimated that Mission: Impossible 7, going into its third weekend in release, would see a mere 31 percent drop in its domestic gross in the third from the second Friday-to-Sunday period, working out to a $13 million+ ($13.3 million) addition to its collection for a total of $142 million.

Once again--even at this late stage of things at which the publication's buoyant expectations for the film circa mid-June have evaporated--Boxoffice Pro proved overoptimistic about this one. The actual drop was 45 percent. Thus, it added under $11 million ($10.7 million) to the take, raising the 17-day total to just $139 million.

Assuming the film suffers just 45 percent drops from week to week (which would be a good deal better than the 61 percent decline the film actually saw in its second week) from this week forward (as of Friday it had just $129 million in the till), the film would be hard-pressed to reach the $180 million mark, a level which in inflation-adjusted terms would be a series low in North America. (After all, even Mission: Impossible III broke the $200 million mark at summer of 2023 prices, a feat looking ever more beyond this one.)

Of course, in relative terms the film is not doing too badly abroad--for now making more than twice its domestic gross internationally (the domestic/international split now along the lines of 31 domestic/69 international), which is in line with the later films. Still, applying that to a final domestic take of $180 million would work out to a final gross of $580 million, again, short of what even the troubled Mission: Impossible III made--in even a relatively optimistic scenario. (Assuming the 61 percent drops prove more characteristic of its trajectory the domestic gross could be closer to $160 million than $180 million.)

Once again, the film is not doing well relative to the investment put into it--so that, just like so many of the films preceding it this summer, it calls into question the viability of not just the franchise but the whole model of filmmaking associated with it.

How Will The Expendables 4 Do? A Box Office Prediction

The Expendables 4 (styled The Expend4bles) is due out September 22. Just how is it likely to do?

The consistent underperformance of big franchise action films this year seems ground for pause here--with this going especially for films banking on depleted nostalgia for '80s-era pop culture. (Top Gun 2 was an exception, helped considerably by breathless media cheerleading and weak summer competition--and the contention supported by how the delusions of Indiana Jones 5 playing like Maverick had the cold water of reality thrown on them this summer.)

It does not help that The Expendables franchise, even at its strongest, was a relatively marginal performer--which saw its North American grosses especially erode after the first film. Consider the box office for the first three films in current and inflation-adjusted dollars (the last, adjusted for July 2023 prices and included in the accompanying parentheses).

The Expendables (2010)--Worldwide--$274 million ($384 million); Domestic--$103 million ($144 million).

The Expendables 2 (2012)--Worldwide--$230 million ($305 million); Domestic--$85 million ($113 million).

The Expendables 3 (2014)--Worldwide--$215 million ($276 million); Domestic--$39 million ($50 million).

In inflation-adjusted terms the third movie made just one-third what the first did in North America a mere four years earlier. Now it has been nine years since that movie, with all that means for the franchise's pull waning, as pop culture moved further on from its recollections of the machine gun-packing heroes of the '80s. (Today anyone who really experienced the cultural moment that was Rambo: First Blood, Part II, or saw Commando in theaters, is likely over fifty.) It is even the case that to the extent that nostalgia is part of the sales pitch the pitch is weaker this time around (with, from that viewpoint, the weakest line-up yet, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis sitting this one out, and no equivalent to the inclusion of Mel Gibson, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Harrison Ford or the others who popped up in the sequels).

The switch of the series back from a PG-13 rating to an R with its promise of an experience somewhat more like those '80s-era films, and the additions to the cast reported in the publicity, seem unlikely to make up for all that very much.

The result is that one could expect the fourth film to do still less well than the third--and this is indeed what Boxoffice Pro projects, anticipating a gross of $31-$45 million over its theatrical run (the low end of the figure less than the first Expendables movie took in on just its opening weekend in current dollars, before inflation). Moreover, unprepossessing as this already is I would not be shocked to see the projection fall in the weeks ahead (as has happened so many times this year with comparable films, like Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible).

That said, one may wonder if there will not be some relief from overseas--as, after all, the prospect of international ticket sales is likely a significant factor why, after the dismal domestic performance of the third film (a decade ago, failing to break the $40 million barrier), there is a fourth film at all. That movie was saved from being a more obvious disaster by the Chinese box office, the movie grossing in that country almost twice what it did in North America (Expendables 3 pulling in $72 million there, a sum accounting for a third of the worldwide gross, and over two-fifths of the international gross). Alas, the performance of American films in China is not what it was just a few years ago. (Consider, for instance, how the latest Mission: Impossible did in China, long a reliable market for the series. Where the sixth film, Fallout, pulled in $181 million back in the summer of 2018--more like $219 million today--Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning had pulled in a little under $49 million there at last count, with not much more to go.)

I see no reason to think Expendables 4 will be some exception to the unhappy pattern, with its domestic/international percentage split more likely to resemble that of the first film (38/62), or at best the second (27/73), than the third (18/82). Assuming the low end of the range projected for the domestic gross (circa $30 million), and a global take of about two-and-a-half times that, we end up with the movie's taking in about $80 million. Assuming the high end of the range ($45 million), and the more robust international response the second film got, one gets a figure in the vicinity of $170 million. The result is that a global gross of $200 million looks like a long shot, while the movie could plausibly fall short of $100 million worldwide--which is what the film's production cost alone has been reported as being, and all of which is likely to make the film a money-loser ruling out any Expendables 5.

Or would have, in normal times. The decisions the supposed "smartest guys in the room" are making these days leave me less and less clear on whether there is actually any thought process going on at all in the executive suites of movieland, even, amid the unceasing Dauriat-like crassness of "the biz," where the matter of expenditure and revenue is concerned.

Mission: Impossible's Place in Pop Culture in 2023--and What it Means for the Series' Fortunes

At this point it has been over a quarter of a century since the first big-screen Mission: Impossible hit theaters (back in 1996). At the time the film was a characteristically '90s exercise in nostalgia--like The Addams Family and The Fugitive and The Flintstones milking the public's hazy recollections of '60s TV to sell tickets, largely to young people who had never seen the original, and probably would not have liked the old thing much if they had--or liked the new thing if they had liked the old.* (Greg Morris, who played Barney Collier on the original show during its seven year run, walked out of a viewing of the 1996 movie and called it an "abomination"--understandably, I think, given what the film did to the original cast of characters.) Indeed, it seems to say something of the slightness of the connection of the film with the show that the movie "borrowed" its most famous scene not from the show but from the entirely unrelated Topkapi (though according to the story I read, at least, Mr. Morris did not stick around long enough to catch that).**

Now the movie franchise has been around for so long that any nostalgia for the original show is long gone--and the movie series putting out new films on the basis of audience familiarity not with the show but with the earlier movies as it endlessly repeats the same tired clichés. (Thus does the Impossible Mission Force become convinced Ethan Hunt is a traitor and forced him to go on the run to stop the bad guys and clear his name in a repeat of the premise of John Buchan's century-old The Thirty-Nine Steps over and over and over again.)

For twenty-seven years.

Considering the span of time that passed between the release of the first Mission: Impossible film and 2023's Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning: Part One I find myself thinking of the twenty-year seven passage between two films in another iconic '60s-era spy-themed action-adventure series, the one that did so much to create the fashion in which Mission: Impossible became a hit--the EON-produced James Bond movies. Twenty-seven years after the James Bond film series' debut we got Licence to Kill in the summer of 1989--in many respects a low point for the series, from the standpoint of commercial cachet, and even its own identity. (The series' runners had coped with declining interest in Bond for decades through frenzied trend-chasing, and the 1989 movie ended up looking more like a big-but-generic '80s drug-dealers-killed-my-favorite-second-cousin thriller than a Bond movie.)

Of course, the latest film in the Mission: Impossible series seems to enjoy more regard from both critics and audiences than Licence to Kill did to go by its Rotten Tomatoes score. Still, that audience is a long way from what it had been at the franchise's start, when the first two movies were, in 2023 dollars, $350 million+ hits in the North American market. Mission: Impossible III, which came out a long six years after the second film, suffered horribly because of the stupid furor over Tom Cruise's stupid couch-jumping, and if the series recovered partially five years later, its draw in America has just never been the same--and its continuation ever more dependent on its foreign grosses, without the burgeoning of which, in large part because of a strong reception in China, it would have ceased to be commercially worthwhile long ago. Now with even the foreign grosses faltering alongside the American (again, I doubt the movie will approach the $200 million mark domestically, leaving it the new low for the series), I doubt that even the most franchise-addicted of the Hollywood Suits will rush to greenlight a continuation. Part Two of Dead Reckoning will still come out of course--but barring a miracle the financial disappointment (and very likely, loss) seems likely to mean that Mission: Impossible 9 will not be coming soon to any theater near you.

But there will probably eventually be a "reboot," because these days there always is, assuming Hollywood-as-we-know-it endures for a few years past next summer.

* Notably this was not the first attempt to cash in on the franchise, ABC airing a revival that ran for 35 episodes over two seasons in October 1988-February 1990.
** This is, of course, the famous heist sequence, taken from the earlier 1964 film, which was an adaptation of Eric Ambler's classic thriller The Light of Day--which I suspect just about everyone these days was invented for the film, just as few realize the bit with the baby carriage in Brian de Palma's prior TV-show-turned-film The Untouchables was swiped from Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin.

What Will the Success of "Barbenheim" Mean for Hollywood? Thoughts After the Second Weekend

After a summer of failures--failures on a large-scale that have been so severe and so numerous as to call into question the whole model of commercial filmmaking on which Hollywood has increasingly relied for a near half-century--the big studios have finally had indisputable and major commercial success with live-action films in the boffo b.o. they racked up in the opening (and second) weekends for Oppenheimer and Barbie.*

However, it is hard to see where the business goes from here.

However high the box office goes for these two films (and for now, Barbie looks likely to be the highest-grossing live-action film of the summer, and perhaps 2023) neither suggests a plausible model for hit-making. Meanwhile anyone hoping that the successes of Nolan and Gerwig will restore the auteur and their visions to a New Hollywood-like stature should remember that the studios, whose attitude toward the "creatives" is expressed in their desire to make the writers literally homeless before imposing on them a doubtless Carthaginian peace, and in the meantime have gone on a "hiring spree" for artificial intelligence specialists. None of this bespeaks any interest in writers and directors getting a freer hand with their work--and in fact I will not expect to see it in the years ahead.

Will Barbie Make a Billion Dollars at the Box Office?

Earlier this year, looking at the roaring success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, I wondered if it would be the only billion-dollar hit of 2023--on account of no live-action film seeming likely to do such business.

Of course, at the time I was mainly thinking about the usual blockbusters--superhero films and such, with this validated for the most part. (Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and much more, The Flash, certainly disappointed that way--as has Indiana Jones, while Fast X and the latest Transformers film did not exceed the low expectations held for them.)

Barbie was not really on my radar. I knew the movie was coming, but was unsure of what to make of it as a box office prospect. (Greta Gerwig has up to now been a maker of small critics' darling films rather than big blockbusters, the little I knew about the movie suggested something far outside the mold of the usual summer blockbuster, I was not sure how well it would travel internationally, etc..) A hit it might be, but a $1 billion+ hit in 2023? I had seen nothing to indicate that, and I suppose neither did anyone else going by the way Boxoffice Pro's tracking shifted very late in the game.

The publication's first projection had Barbie making just $55-$85 million in its opening weekend and topping out in the vicinity of $225 million at best when all was said and done--far from the makings of a billion dollar hit. It was only later, with the figure surging from week to week that they came to anticipate twice their original projection just before its release.

Moreover, their heightened expectation proved correct, with the film pulling in $162 million in its first three days. Assuming a typical front-loaded blockbuster profile one would expect that to account for 40 percent of the total, suggesting a final gross in the $400 million range, though there now seem expectations of much more--not least because, thanks to an excellent second weekend hold for such a big movie (the second Friday-to-Sunday period gross falling a mere 43 percent from that of the first weekend), it has already blasted past the $350 million mark in its first ten days.

Meanwhile the film has had a strong response overseas, taking in at least half its money there, raising the global total to the vicinity of $750 million--again, just ten days on. Should this pattern continue as the film approaches the half billion dollar mark in North America then the movie can be expected to cross the $1 billion mark, and fairly soon, on the way to some point well past that. The result is that in a few weeks 2023 may well have had a billion-dollar live-action Hollywood hit--just not from among the usual suspects.

* The two movies in question were Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2.

Will Greta Gerwig's Barbie Be the Highest-Grossing Live-Action Film of 2023 in North America?

Greta Gerwig's Barbie grossed $162 million in its opening weekend in North America. Once upon a time a merely respectable sum for a major blockbuster (even last year two Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that broke $180 million were thought to have done less well than hoped), it has been the best three-day performance of 2023 so far, and (even if the claquing for Gerwig and her movie and all associated with them has been nothing short of thunderous) not unreasonably seen as sensational.*

This contributed to Barbie taking in $258 million domestically in its first seven day period, while it has in its second weekend displayed surprisingly good legs for a movie that opened so big so late in the summer. (Boxoffice Pro expected a 45 percent drop from the first weekend to the second; instead it has managed an even better 43 percent.)

Adding up to a $351 million take in its first ten days, Barbie has almost matched the entire domestic run of the highest-grossing live-action movie of the year, Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Imagining, cautiously, that the movie has only made three-fifths or so of its domestic gross to date, one can imagine it blasting past the $500 million mark--well past it. Should holds like the one seen this past weekend continue, $600 million+ would not be out of the question.

The result is that the year could easily see the competition for the #1 spot come down to either Barbie or The Super Mario Bros. Movie as the #1 film--both toys today's adults played with as kids conquered the box office from the superheroes, for 2023 at least.

I am sure cultural commentators of a certain type will have a field day with that idea.

A Surprising Positive Review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

The film critic David Walsh has reviewed for his publication Nolan's Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), Dunkirk (2017) and Nolan's last, Tenet (2021).

During that nearly two decade period, during which the rest of the critical community has been consistently breathless in its praises for anything and everything Nolan does, Walsh has been consistently, strongly, negative in his appraisal of Nolan's work. I might add that as the reviews of the Batman films and Dunkirk in particular indicate, Walsh was particularly unimpressed with the films' handling of political and historical themes--exactly what happen to be at the heart of Oppenheimer.

The result was that I expected that, if Walsh reviewed the film their appraisal would be an utter evisceration of the film--even before the reviews of the movie were in, and certainly after I read what Mark Hughes had to say of the film's deficiencies (as he read them).

Instead Walsh, in a review--co-written with J. Cooper--offers very high praise of the film in what seems to me the most surprising review of his that I have ever read.

While Walsh and his colleague acknowledge the film's "genuine weaknesses" (in this case not the usual complaints about the sex, but rather the handling of the history that most critics cannot be bothered with, like the ways in which a biographical approach clashes with a historical one), Oppenheimer is in their view "a serious and appropriately disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war" telling an "engrossing story" that "is intended to leave viewers shaken, and . . . succeeds in that" as a film with a real critical edge, and real force. Indeed, in an extreme contrast with Hughes' view of the film, and Walsh's view of Nolan's earlier works, the review remarks Nolan's "treating many of the weighty historical issues contained in Robert Oppenheimer's life with sincerity and urgency" --all as, testifying to some artistry here, the filmmaker managed to make a movie "quite pointed" about "the horrors of nuclear weapons and the threat they represent to humanity" while "eschew[ing] didacticism." Particularly astonishing in a director so often associated with the right (not least because of that third Batman film, in which, as Walsh's colleague Adam Haig put it in his review of that movie, Nolan "defends plutocracy, associates the working class with violent murderers and thugs, identifies revolution with terrorism" in a "condescending, cruel, misanthropic, ugly and unreal" piece of "artistic and social falseness and pseudo-gravitas"), this review specifically commends Nolan for "treat[ing] honestly" the "scenes of left-wing intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s."

Thus: after dispraise for the film where I had not expected it (from a Nolan fan writing for a mainstream publication), praise where I had not expected it (from a reviewer who has been anything but a Nolan fan, from a publication whose editorial line has been consistently critical of Nolan and the politics associated with him).

At the very least the movie is garnering surprising reactions from serious critics who have followed Nolan's work for a long time. And if nothing else there seems to me something to be said for that, while it may well be that, whatever Oppenheimer's limitations, to go by the reviews of both Hughes and Walsh, Nolan is doing that very, very rare thing among those to whom the box office and the critics have been so consistently and profusely good for so long--stretching himself as an artist, however one regards the result.

Mission: Impossible 7's Second Weekend at the Box Office: How Did the Movie Do?

Boxoffice Pro estimated that Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning, Part One would see its Friday-to-Sunday gross fall 53 percent from the first weekend to the second, working out to a $26 million take over the weekend and $126 million in the till as of Sunday.

Instead the movie suffered a 64 percent drop, working out to a $20 million second weekend and a total of $119 million so far.

By comparison the last Mission: Impossible film, Mission: Impossible--Fallout--had, as of its second weekend, $129 million, and as of its twelfth day in release (a Tuesday, as it came out on a Friday in contrast with the Wednesday release of Mission: Impossible 7), $134 million.
The result is that the movie may be characterized as running between 9 and 11 percent behind Mission: Impossible 6 at this point.

Mission: Impossible 6 ultimately grossed 59 percent of its total in its first ten days in release, and 61 percent of its total in its first twelve. Applied to Mission: Impossible 7 this would leave the movie (again) making just $200 million in North America--while the movie's faster fade at the box office (Fallout's holds were far better, the first-to-second weekend drop just 42 percent) suggests much weaker legs, and thus a higher proportion of all the money it is likely to make in its domestic run already collected. The result is that I expect the movie will finish its domestic run short of the $200 million mark (which, again, would make it a series low in real terms), though how far short remains to be seen.

Accordingly that much more will depend on the film's international take bottom line-wise. So far the film is taking in a smaller proportion of its total overseas than its predecessor--the split 32/68. Unless this gets better $700 million, never mind the $850 million I earlier expected, remains well out of reach.

"Just how much has the rough competition of the weekend of 'Barbenheimer' contributed to the drop?" some are doubtless wondering.

Obviously it did not help, but it also did not hurt very much. The truth is that franchise films like this one have been disappointing at the box office all summer--in fact, after decades of box office-watching I can't remember a single summer that saw so many big movies crash and burn like this (Fast and Furious, Transformers, The Flash, Indiana Jones)--and the falling expectations for Mission: Impossible 7 in the weeks before release, followed by its disappointing opening weekend, were no exception to the trend. Its prospects would probably not have been all that bright even in a weekend of ordinary summer competition. After all, Barbie and Oppenheimer are not competing blockbusters of similar type, but the "counter-programming," catering to fairly different audiences underserved by the usual run of summer fare--such that I suspect few of the people who went to them would have bothered to catch Dead Reckoning instead.

No, instead of blaming unusually strong competition this should be seen as another instance of the increasingly strong pattern of aged, over-the-hill franchises and their sequels that no one asked for being rejected by the audience that didn't ask for them--though admittedly that is something of which neither Barbie, nor Oppenheimer, can be accused.

Oppenheimer's First Weekend at the Box Office

Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer now looks to finish its run with about $80 million grossed domestically in its first three days.

Even the conventional superhero and animated spectacle tentpoles are lucky to do that well these days--which makes the gross extraordinary for a movie that is not just a historical biography about a scientist set in the 1940s and 1950s, but a "weirdo" postmodernist art film. (Think of it this way: its three-day take matched the take of Mission: Impossible 7 in its first five days of release.)

Still, I am curious to see how the movie does in its second weekend--and if it has not left a significant share of ticket-buyers disappointed or worse. We will learn more about that in the coming weeks.

How Will Blue Beetle Do? (A Note on the Boxoffice Pro's Tracking)

These days even the biggest movies from the bigger franchises are having a tough time getting audiences to the theaters--and smaller movies having a tougher time still. Thus Guardians of the Galaxy 3 disappoints (finishing up a fifth down from the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 when we adjust for inflation), while Shazam 2 craters (this $100 million+ DCEU superhero movie finishing with $134 million taken in globally).

Blue Beetle was an originally straight-to-streaming release "upgraded" with a bigger budget in the wake of its studio's declining interest in costly streaming projects that saw them decide to bury a nearly complete Batgirl film rather than give it the same treatment.

Still, from the standpoint of resources invested and name recognition the movie was more Shazam than Guardians of the Galaxy (never mind Spider-Man).

All the same, catching Blue Beetle's trailer a while back I thought it at least promised a fast, flashy, fun summer movie. (Indeed, it made a better impression that way than the contemporaneous Captain Marvel 2 trailer.)

Was it possible that Blue Beetle would defy the odds? Not necessarily becoming a billion-dollar hit, but still being a meaningful success on a smaller scale?

Alas, to go by Boxoffice Pro's projection Blue Beetle will be lucky to do as well as Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Their analyst Shawn Robbins anticipates a $12-$17 million opening on the way to a $27-$55 million gross at the end of its domestic run.

Shazam 2, by contrast, opened with $30 million--far above the high end of the range projected for Blue Beetle--on its way to a $58 million gross even after its collapse in the second weekend.

Of course, Blue Beetle will not actually hit theaters for four weeks, and a lot can change in that period. We have seen many a movie's tracking-based prospects wither in that time frame (in fact this has happened again and again this year, perhaps most pointedly The Flash), but sometimes their prospects improve--with this weekend's Barbie an excellent example. (A month ago Boxoffice Pro was thinking the movie's first three days might take in as little as $55 million. Now the range they have in mind is two-and-a-half to three times that, $140-$175 million.) Still, whether or not the film lives up to this promise the more likely outcome is its confirming the impressions so many of superhero fatigue and the commercial pointlessness of putting out smaller films of that kind.

Expect an update on that during the coming weeks.

Captain Marvel 2's Prospects: Revisiting the Box Office Prediction

The new trailer for The Marvels is out.

My thoughts: in contrast with the prior trailer, which frankly made the movie look a bit cheap, and may have overemphasized the element of goofy comedy, the new one makes The Marvels at least look the part of a big-budget CGI-packed Marvel Cinematic Universe adventure.

Of course, I had thought this would probably happen soon enough (especially given the talk of the film's release's delay having had to do at least in part with the desire to get the FX right), so this does not change things much from what I expected back in early May.

Rather what has changed is my image of the American box office's condition (and the world's as well). Late last year my thought was that 2023 would see the box office more or less return to its pre-pandemic norm, and this was confirmed by the first four months of the year as the box office take improved significantly over the same period back in 2022. However, instead of this summer continuing that improvement the summer of 2023's first two months actually saw a drop compared with that of 2022, so that the box office has been moving further away from the pre-pandemic norm rather than closing the gap with it.

Putting it simply, this summer has indeed been crowded with tentpoles--but audiences have rejected them, with this year's installments in the biggest franchises underperforming again and again (Fast and Furious, Transformers, even Indiana Jones), with superhero films not exempt (The Flash). Meanwhile salvation has not been forthcoming from the international markets (with China, in particular, ever less receptive to Hollywood's products).

Of course, there is a counter-argument in Captain Marvel 2's case. Admittedly Marvel has not escaped the more general trend toward lower grosses by any means, with Thor 4, Black Panther 2 and especially Ant-Man 3 doing much less well than their predecessors. Still, if Phase Four was disappointing (even more so than was publicly known, it seemed, given the recent revelations about how Dr. Strange 2 really did), only Ant-Man 3 looks like a genuine flop, with this substantially a matter of its performance in China, while Guardians of the Galaxy 3, if not wholly bucking the trend, is still a hit by just about any standard by Marvel's (and indeed, the second-biggest hit of the year as of July, after only The Super Mario Bros. Movie).* This suggests that Marvel, if looking ever further away from its Phase Three peak, is at least a more robust contender than the competition (which has done a lot worse), and should not be counted out too hastily. Indeed, should Captain Marvel 2 suffer only a Guardians of the Galaxy 3-like drop in its theatrical gross when compared with its predecessor it would still be a $1 billion hit--perhaps the only such non-animated film to achieve that distinction this year.**

Still, it is worth noting that Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was saved by decent legs after a disappointing opening that raised the specter of its being another Ant-Man 3. This suggests that people's enthusiasm had been dimmed, while the film's good legs were probably at least in part a matter of surprisingly slight competition as all those other big summer movies failed to interest viewers, and they still left Guardians of the Galaxy 3 the weakest performer by a good way in a trilogy that was a long way from being Marvel's strongest performer. The result is that lot would have to go Captain Marvel 2's way for the film to be as fortunate in its commercial release--the more in as the film confronts so many headwinds. The result is that I am sticking with my expectation of $700 million as high as it is likely to go--while, as with Shazam 2, The Flash and Indiana Jones (and the upcoming Aquaman 2) I find myself increasingly wondering about the possibility of collapse.

* Adjusting mid-2017 (i.e. May 2017) prices for those of mid-2023 (May 2023) the gross of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 comes to about $1.07 billion, versus the $850 million at which Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is topping out, leaving it a fifth down in real terms.
** Adjusting March 2019 prices for mid-2023 turns Captain Marvel's $1.1 billion gross into one of $1.35 billion today--20 percent off of which would still leave the movie with $1.08 billion.

Some Thoughts on the "Barbenheimer" Nonsense

Considering the summer's films here I have had little to say about either Barbie, or Oppenheimer--in large part because I have so much interested myself in films' box office prospects, and both those films lack the kind of reference points I usually really on in making my estimates. (Thinking about Indiana Jones 5 we could think about the other four Indiana Jones films--and we could think about, for example, Solo, which turned out to be more relevant. Considering this summer's Memorial Day weekend-released live action adaptation of a three decade-old Disney animated classic The Little Mermaid we could think about 2019's significantly parallel Aladdin--and watching the movie run out of steam before Aladdin could guess at how it would end up. And so forth. Nothing like that exists for Barbie, or Oppenheimer.)

Indeed, that the press has produced the silly portmanteau "Barbenheimer" out of the release of these two very unlike films says something.

Still, there seems something to be said about the pair.

Both, not being the most obvious blockbusters, were heavily promoted on the basis of the director's name and its associated critical cachet--Greta Gerwig, and Christopher Nolan.

Both, if not spectacles of the CGI-packed action-adventure and splashy animated types to which we are accustomed at this time of year, still rely on visual novelty for their interest, be it the plastic-toys-come-to-life pink-saturated images of Barbie, or the IMAXed avant garde-filmmaking of Oppenheimer.

And both in their ways harken back to that mid-century period so critical in defining American social and political and cultural life, with a toy of the 1950s that was to be an icon of the era, and the birth of the atomic age.

The last seems to me especially significant--a reminder that even when a big Hollywood movie is not a sequel the glance remains decidedly backward.

Courtesy of Forbes: A Negative Review of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer

As anyone attentive to the press for the film is well aware, the critics and the entertainment press generally are in full claqueur mode where the subject of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer comes up.

This makes the more critical exceptions to the "Greatest Thing Ever!" adulation the more interesting--and surprisingly it is Forbes that brings us such an exception, by way of critic Mark Hughes.

While Hughes accounts himself a "huge fan" of Nolan's prior work, and (significant given its parallel with this film) specifically cites Dunkirk as "the filmmaker's greatest achievement to date," such that he expected to join the chorus singing its praises, he was not impressed with this film--and makes a formidable case for his position.

Basically what it comes to is the three-hour Oppenheimer, in spite of some great acting and some well-directed bits, being a pretentious, overstylized piece of postmodernist arthouse fare--fragmented, nonlinear, willfully dissonant and incoherent, and in its irony and superficiality, and the evasions and nihilism ultimately underlying them, taking up a weighty subject and then taking a very long time to say nothing about it at all. Indeed, Hughes likens what Oppenheimer offers to Nolan shooting three different movies about different parts of its protagonist's life at different stages of that life (Nolan's personal involvements with women, the work on the Manhattan Project, his later political troubles), each in a different tone and style and even political sensibility (!) and none of them adding up to much more than a "collage" of scenes that happened, and then chopping them up and mixing the bits together all out of order and connecting them with "clipped and jarring" editing "jumping . . . unequally and unpredictably" from one bit to another that has Hughes waxing poetic about the film perhaps being an artistic "distill[ation]" of quantum physics' conception of reality. Admittedly one might still hope to create something of interest through the juxtapositions such an approach can allow, but this is very, very difficult, and does not seem the case here, the assembly striking Hughes as random, while there is little sense of anything as more important than anything else (as seen in the "excessive" attention to Oppenheimer's romantic life that distracts from rather than complementing or cohering with his scientific work), and the "political sensibilities" are "all over the map," the film "represent[ing] one perspective only to shrug it off in favor of something else . . . while" denying it has any "perspective at all." The result is that in the end it does indeed seem a movie that "says very little, and means none of it" as it ultimately "abandon[s] any visionary search for higher meaning behind the processes of science or politics."

It made for what Hughes thought not only a "disappointing" and "underwhelming" film, but one that he "would have a tough time" just "sitting through . . . again."

Going by Hughes' assessment the film would seem to be all too consistent with earlier readings of the filmmaking of one who, as David Walsh put it, gave us a movie about "the outbreak of World War II without history or politics"; and confirmation of all my skepticism about the movie, and the critics, who even when they are not doing "Job One" by earning their pay as claqueurs, so often show themselves to be Midcult-consuming middlebrows.

Of course, the claqueurs/middlebrows of the entertainment media are one thing, the general public another. As we saw in their failing to excite the general public about The Flash (at this point, an indisputable, catastrophic flop) their applause does not always infect the wider audience as hoped, which is now having its say. Will Nolan's postmodernist three hour art movie that takes up the life of Robert Oppenheimer and the events in which he was involved and turns it into "a movie about nothing" really please the crowds, and they tell all their friends to see it too? Or will those who are not hardcore middlebrows who say they like what cultural Authorities tell them they are supposed to like but just drawn in by vague notions of something special and fondness for Nolan's more popular projects walk away disgusted? We will see this weekend--and of course, the next weekend too, the first-to-second weekend hold more than usually interesting this time around.

About Those Oppenheimer Posters . . .

A little while ago I discussed here my views of Christopher Nolan's strengths and weaknesses that left me with low expectations for his highly touted new film Oppenheimer.

The poster did not allay those suspicions.

After all, Nolan has shown himself to be exceedingly "conventional" in his views--and where science and engineering are concerned that conventional perspective imagines science as wizardry, and scientists as summoners, or even gods--a false way of looking at the matter, the more in as it is usually reduced to a summoner or god rather than many. That the film is based on and presented as a "biography" (where, as A.J.P. Taylor wrote, instead of history's putting society first, the writer "builds up his individual subject until society is almost forgotten") makes me suspect this will be all the more the case here--reducing that extraordinary example of Big Science, the "Manhattan Project," to the doings of one man.

The poster in which Oppenheimer is seen standing amid the blast of an apparent nuclear explosion would seem to confirm this evil-creation-of-a-god image. The later poster, in which Cillian Murphy stands in front of what looks like a big bomb with an even more than usually creepy expression on his lean, vaguely otherworldly face, confirms it yet again, in its way more powerfully. And frankly this nonsense is the last thing we need right now as the problems raised by the deficiencies of public and even elite understanding of science and technology--of science as method, and of how things actually get invented and made--seem the more pressing by the day; and amid great power conflict, the threat of nuclear war resurges horribly.

That fashionable commentators ignore that as they gabble about the hyping of artificial intelligence only underlines the fact.

Mission: Impossible 7 (Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning, Part One)--What Does its Opening Weekend Gross Tell Us About its Longer-Run Prospects?

I previously made an estimate of Mission: Impossible 7's likely global box office gross. Working off of the grosses of past installments in the franchise, while taking into account Boxoffice Pro's tracking and the ways the market may have changed recently (with the usually strong market of China likely to kick in less, but Tom Cruise getting a bump from the success of Top Gun 2 elsewhere), I suggested $850-$950 million as the likely range for the global gross.

I made no prediction regarding the opening weekend, and certainly not the domestic opening weekend--but I did note Boxoffice Pro's initial estimate of $65-$80 million for the first three days of its run, and if Boxoffice Pro was quick in revising the figure downward, right before the opening weekend it still projected over $68 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period.

The movie actually made $56 million in the Friday-to-Sunday--and $80 million for the whole five-day period between the Wednesday release and Sunday (where as late as the preceding week Boxoffice Pro projected $100 million for the first five days).

It is a significant shortfall--about 30 percent below the earlier estimate's ceiling, and 14 percent below its floor, while the five-day take is a rough fifth down from the pre-weekend estimate.

Moreover, it is plausible that the opening weekend shortfall will translate to a commensurate shortfall over its longer run. Where Boxoffice Pro had the film making about four times its initial Friday-to-Sunday gross over the whole run, which gave it $250-$320 million domestically, quadrupling what the movie actually made would give it about $225 million. It is also easy to see this assumption of unusually good legs as optimistic. The immediately prior films have managed more like 3.6 times their opening weekend gross, which from a start of $56 million would work out to more like $200 million. This would put the movie on a level with the series low to date, Mission: Impossible III (the one that came out after the stupid fuss about Cruise's public couch-jumping). And the disappointing opening weekend numbers may hint at the film doing still less well. Should it merely triple its opening weekend gross over the longer run (as with the by-today's-lowered-standard-pretty-good performance of Guardians of the Galaxy 3) it would end up with a mere $170 million in the till.

Of course, the Mission: Impossible series has long depended on the international markets for its profitability. Still, even assuming the movie does relatively as well there as Mission: Impossible--Fallout, the movie will just multiply the domestic gross by a factor of 3.6 (funny how that number comes up here too) such an expectation could prove overoptimistic given how film franchises very well-received in China in the past (the MCU, Fast and Furious, Transformers) have recently done, with Mission: Impossible 7's performance here so far no exception. (Thus far the movie has collected a mere $31 million in China, as against the spectacular $181 million it made back in 2018, even before we think of inflation.) If we think more in terms of how Mission: Impossible 4 (which had respectable but still more restrained foreign numbers, in part because of a more modest boost from China), then the movie just triples its domestic gross. And for the time being the movie is doing less well than that, with a 35/65 domestic/foreign split--which is to say, a global multiplier of 2.8.

So where does that leave us?

My guess as to the domestic range is now $170-$225 million, with the multiplier for the global take in the 2.8-3.6 range. Rounding to the nearest $50 million that works out to a global range of $500-$800 million. The high end of that range (just a bit below the floor on my earlier guess) would not be too bad, especially if people came away from the film looking forward to Part 2 of "Dead Reckoning." But anything much below it would likely be a real problem for yet another post-COVID movie that saw its budget bloated by delays, inflation and interest rates as the box office softened, with it seeming to say something that Deadline has drawn a comparison between it and what is looking like the unmitigated financial catastrophe of Indiana Jones 5.

The result is that while the second weekend is always important in clarifying how a movie is likely to do in the end Mission: Impossible 7's weaker than hoped for start in a shaky market, and the particularly high expectations that come with a near-billion dollar franchise and a near-$300 million production budget, make it even more than usually so.

Expect a follow-up after the numbers for this weekend are in.