In the 11-week period beginning in the first weekend in May and ending with the third Thursday of July the summer movie season of 2023 was actually running 7 percent behind that of 2022 in current dollars, with $2.373 billion taken in versus the prior year's $2.557 billion. (Adjusting the numbers for inflation, of course, makes the picture still worse. Going by the 3 percent rise of prices between July 2022 and July 2023 reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index the summer of 2023 was more like 10 percent behind in real terms.) That is to say the first weeks of July not only continued but worsened the pattern seen in the first two months of the summer as Indiana Jones 5 flopped, and Mission: Impossible 7, far from getting a bump from the good will toward the prior year's Top Gun 2 as many suggested, proved the series' weakest earner to date (all as the slew of disappointing earlier releases still played, like The Flash, continued to make very little money).*
However, things went very differently after that third week in July--when Barbie and Oppenheimer hit theaters in the same weekend. In the 46-day period between that fourth weekend in July and Memorial Day the box office took in almost twice what it had the year before--$1.665 billion, versus the prior year's $834 million. The extra $800 million+ more than made up for the circa $200 million shortfall of the prior two-thirds of the season, and resulted in the summer of 2023 managing to exceed the gross of the prior summer overall ($4.038 billion to $3.391 billion overall, a gain of a fifth in current dollars and a rough sixth in real terms).
As one might guess, that stellar late season box office compares favorably with robust late summer periods of the pre-pandemic years. (Even adjusting for inflation this was about 83 percent of what the box office took in in the same period in the year of Suicide Squad, 2016, and 91 percent of the gross for the matching period in 2019.) And it was overwhelmingly due to just two movies--namely Barbie and Oppenheimer. With $923 million taken in between them by themselves they outgrossed every movie in theaters in the same stretch in 2022, including even Top Gun 2 in these later phases of its impressively leggy run, and accounted for 55 percent of the take of the whole box office during those 46 days (as well as 23 percent of what the movies made during the whole season).
Even though many were bullish about both those movies few expected them to do quite so well. (Just a month before release Boxoffice Pro's projection's high end in the range of $200 million for both, and even if its estimates went up over the following weeks the movies have outpaced the publication's highest expectations.**) It is a reminder that in this case Hollywood's salvation was a surprise--just as was the case with the Super Mario Bros. Movie that delivered a Barbie-like gross back in the spring (in its way more impressive, as the critics were bashing it rather than cheerleading for it as they have been Barbie)--while all three of these movies have confirmed a pattern since the pandemic in which a mere handful of big movies account for an ever-higher share of movie ticket sales.
That, in turn, confirms something else--the way Hollywood's once reliably blockbuster-generating machinery is sputtering, such that when it does succeed it underlines its own haplessness.
Will Hollywood luck out this way again in 2023? None of the upcoming releases with which I am familiar look very promising that way (even before we get to the way in which the strike and all connected with it are getting so many of this year's movies bumped to next year). But anyone with a different opinion is, as always, welcome to offer their thoughts in the comment thread below.
* After its first fifteen days in release The Flash added a mere $12.5 million to its domestic gross (at least, as of August 17, on which its total was $189).
** Notably Boxoffice Pro was at that point still expecting both Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible to make well over $200 million and very possibly break the $300 million barrier even as they put out their estimates for the two late July releases discussed here. Their July 13 forecast, one week before release, they still pictured Barbie topping out not much above $400 million at best ($426 million), and Oppenheimer falling short of the $200 million mark ($194 million)--significant underestimates on both counts (working out to a combined maximum in the $600 million range, whereas their actual grosses are now $900 million+).
Saturday, September 9, 2023
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
The Summer Movie Season of 2023: Has the Recovery Continued?
With Labor Day behind us it seems that the summer movie season of 2023 has run its course, making it possible to start evaluating the season as a whole--not least in regard to the film industry's post-pandemic financial recovery.
Let us take as the beginning of the time frame relevant to such a judgment what Box Office Mojo reports as the first $4 billion summer (and as it happens, the moment of the Great Recession in whose shadow we have lived ever since), 2007. Put in terms of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' tentative calculations about inflation, it was equivalent to a $6.1 billion gross in 2023 dollars (in which all subsequent figures will be presented). As it happens the figure was high, but not really exceptional for the period, the average for the seven-year 2007-2013 period about $6 billion a year (with 2013 itself a peak for the time span covered, with some $6.2 billion grossed). However, the numbers trended downward from there, with the norm for 2014-2019 (and 2015-2019) $5.3 billion, and the figures for 2018 and 2019 $5.3 billion and $5.1 billion respectively.
By contrast the years since saw a collapse in 2020, and a slow recovery since, with the relevant figures presented below:
2020-$83 million
2021-$1.96 billion
2022-$3.53 billion
2023-$4.03 billion
Considered in such terms one can say that 2023, the highest summer gross since before the pandemic, equaled about three-quarters of the norm for the 2014-2019 summer movie seasons (as against the mere 2 percent made in 2020, the two-fifths made in 2021). The implication is that the recovery has mostly already taken place--especially when we consider the extent to which grosses were already declining before the pandemic, implying that even without the pandemic we might have expected grosses in the 2020s to be a little lower than their 2014-2019 level anyway (as streaming and other alternatives continued their erosion of the theatrical release's draw).
Meanwhile, as the improvement is less dramatic than before, certainly to go by the difference between the 2023 and 2022 seasons (when year-on-year inflation-adjusted grosses went up by a seventh) and that between the 2022 and 2021 seasons (over which span of time the gross almost doubled) it seems that progress is slowing down. The result is that it may be a long time, if ever, before we see a $5 billion+ (real terms) movie season again, the more in as the summer itself testifies to problems the industry faces besides the shock to moviegoing habits, the loss of a percentage of venues, etc.. There is the plain and simple fact of, as superhero fatigue and the piling up of the flops this summer showed, Hollywood's being wedded to a model of moviemaking that is farther along the path of diminishing returns than we realized, such that where (for all my reservations and doubts about that model's continuation) I still expected that 2023's plenitude of franchise films was going to make the movie season "normal" again, they have had the opposite effect, giving us one underperformance after another, adding up to an unprepossessing total. Indeed, the 2023 May-June period saw movies take in less money at the American box office than they had in the same period a year before, a reversal of the trend toward recovery rather than its continuation, while it seems the far-above-expectations success of those more anomalous late July releases Barbie and Oppenheimer that saved this summer.* Alas, hits like that cannot be mass-manufactured--and as we watch the studios press ahead with their fantasies of a rebooted DCEU and Marvel Phase Six as they enlist artificial intelligence specialists while the writers walk the picket lines, they seem to have no intention whatsoever of making movies any other way.
* As of September 4 Barbie had made $612 million, and Oppenheimer $311 million, the two movies by themselves accounting for 23 percent of the whole season's $4.03 billion take, even as they still have a little way to go. Putting it another way Barbie singlehandedly outgrossed The Flash ($108 million), Fast X ($146 million), Transformers 6 ($157 million) and Mission: Impossible 7 combined ($171 million), while more than tripling the gross of Indiana Jones 5 ($174 million).
Let us take as the beginning of the time frame relevant to such a judgment what Box Office Mojo reports as the first $4 billion summer (and as it happens, the moment of the Great Recession in whose shadow we have lived ever since), 2007. Put in terms of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' tentative calculations about inflation, it was equivalent to a $6.1 billion gross in 2023 dollars (in which all subsequent figures will be presented). As it happens the figure was high, but not really exceptional for the period, the average for the seven-year 2007-2013 period about $6 billion a year (with 2013 itself a peak for the time span covered, with some $6.2 billion grossed). However, the numbers trended downward from there, with the norm for 2014-2019 (and 2015-2019) $5.3 billion, and the figures for 2018 and 2019 $5.3 billion and $5.1 billion respectively.
By contrast the years since saw a collapse in 2020, and a slow recovery since, with the relevant figures presented below:
2020-$83 million
2021-$1.96 billion
2022-$3.53 billion
2023-$4.03 billion
Considered in such terms one can say that 2023, the highest summer gross since before the pandemic, equaled about three-quarters of the norm for the 2014-2019 summer movie seasons (as against the mere 2 percent made in 2020, the two-fifths made in 2021). The implication is that the recovery has mostly already taken place--especially when we consider the extent to which grosses were already declining before the pandemic, implying that even without the pandemic we might have expected grosses in the 2020s to be a little lower than their 2014-2019 level anyway (as streaming and other alternatives continued their erosion of the theatrical release's draw).
Meanwhile, as the improvement is less dramatic than before, certainly to go by the difference between the 2023 and 2022 seasons (when year-on-year inflation-adjusted grosses went up by a seventh) and that between the 2022 and 2021 seasons (over which span of time the gross almost doubled) it seems that progress is slowing down. The result is that it may be a long time, if ever, before we see a $5 billion+ (real terms) movie season again, the more in as the summer itself testifies to problems the industry faces besides the shock to moviegoing habits, the loss of a percentage of venues, etc.. There is the plain and simple fact of, as superhero fatigue and the piling up of the flops this summer showed, Hollywood's being wedded to a model of moviemaking that is farther along the path of diminishing returns than we realized, such that where (for all my reservations and doubts about that model's continuation) I still expected that 2023's plenitude of franchise films was going to make the movie season "normal" again, they have had the opposite effect, giving us one underperformance after another, adding up to an unprepossessing total. Indeed, the 2023 May-June period saw movies take in less money at the American box office than they had in the same period a year before, a reversal of the trend toward recovery rather than its continuation, while it seems the far-above-expectations success of those more anomalous late July releases Barbie and Oppenheimer that saved this summer.* Alas, hits like that cannot be mass-manufactured--and as we watch the studios press ahead with their fantasies of a rebooted DCEU and Marvel Phase Six as they enlist artificial intelligence specialists while the writers walk the picket lines, they seem to have no intention whatsoever of making movies any other way.
* As of September 4 Barbie had made $612 million, and Oppenheimer $311 million, the two movies by themselves accounting for 23 percent of the whole season's $4.03 billion take, even as they still have a little way to go. Putting it another way Barbie singlehandedly outgrossed The Flash ($108 million), Fast X ($146 million), Transformers 6 ($157 million) and Mission: Impossible 7 combined ($171 million), while more than tripling the gross of Indiana Jones 5 ($174 million).
Data East's Tattoo Assassins and '90s Pop Culture
Back in the '90s there were rumors of a Mortal Kombat sequel video game containing "nudalities."
The rumor, so far as I know, was completely baseless, but it is often mentioned in connection with a different video game that actually did contain "nudalities," Tattoo Assassins.
That game never actually made it to market--apparently just a few machines sent out to trade shows and test markets before the effort collapsed. These days it is remembered, to the extent that it is remembered at all, mainly as a blatant and bizarre attempt to cash in on the success of far better-made games of comparable type.
Considering it today I do not presume to offer a description, or a review (as all my knowledge about it is secondhand, based on others' descriptions and reviews). Rather what strikes me is just how distinctly '90s the whole thing was (at least, to go by the accounts available online).
There is the kind of game it was--a fighting game for the arcade market, both of which were big in the '90s, but have long since gone bust.* However, more fundamental than that is the way that Tattoo Assassins' makers at Data East tried cashing in on the craze--by getting edgy in that EXTREME! '90s way, while also getting ironic in that '90s way. Thus they seized on those aspects that had made Mortal Kombat its own little moral panic, like the fatalities, which were pretty ridiculous to begin with, and made them more so--filling the game with vast numbers of ever more over-the-top finishing moves (2000+ according to the promotion) to the point of making a parody-of-a-parody out of them. This was even before one got to the nudalities so plainly intended to get people jaw-jawing (while, if they were mainly played for shock value and laughs, in tantalizing the audience with the prospect of seeing the digitized actresses playing its female characters in a state of undress those nudalities added a risqué touch befitting the era of Leisure Suit Larry). There was the influence of the tabloid culture that seemed to be swallowing everything up in one of the playable characters being obviously based on ice skater Nancy Kerrigan. (Meanwhile, though this happened only after the production, it seems somehow telling of this aspect of the game and its moment that the actress playing another of the principal characters--Frederick's of Hollywood model Gretchen Stockdale, who played Hannah Hart--in real life ended up in an even more lunatic media frenzy herself when, after getting a call from O.J. Simpson the night of Nicole Brown's murder as she did, she ended up a witness at the trial! So if you wanted you could make a "Nancy Kerrigan clone" fight it out with an "O.J. Simpson trial witness"--which is as '90s as it gets.) There was even a touch of that '70s nostalgia that so obsessed the pop culture makers of the decade, with another playable character a Native American named Billy apparently meant to evoke '70s icon Billy Jack.
So far as I can tell discussion of the game is overwhelmingly sneering in tone, emphasizing the game's derivativeness, and the poor workmanship that was probably unavoidable given the kind of rushed production schedule calling to mind the legend of Atari's adaptation of Steven Spielberg's E.T., as well as the undeniably lowbrow and shameless character of the gimmicks intended to make yet another Mortal Kombat knockoff stand out in a market ever-more crowded with them. Still, even if a good game all this does not make (it may say something that, so far as I know, no one has tried to patch it up and market it to gamers as a novelty if nothing else) it does, in a moment when we have enough distance from the '90s to think of it as having a distinct sensibility, a distinct aesthetic, give Tattoo Assassins an interest as a telling piece of pop cultural history (just like those now long-forgotten Billy Jack movies it evoked).
* It seems that fighting games lost their interest as complicated combat became assimilated into gaming generally--while the gameplay generally became so involved that casual gamers and button-mashers were pretty much shut out (and not just in fighting games). With arcades the issue seems to be that the gaming companies were unable to give the player a more dazzling experience than their home console for that by this point inflated quarter--and also unable to get them to part with more money than that, precipitating their decline.
The rumor, so far as I know, was completely baseless, but it is often mentioned in connection with a different video game that actually did contain "nudalities," Tattoo Assassins.
That game never actually made it to market--apparently just a few machines sent out to trade shows and test markets before the effort collapsed. These days it is remembered, to the extent that it is remembered at all, mainly as a blatant and bizarre attempt to cash in on the success of far better-made games of comparable type.
Considering it today I do not presume to offer a description, or a review (as all my knowledge about it is secondhand, based on others' descriptions and reviews). Rather what strikes me is just how distinctly '90s the whole thing was (at least, to go by the accounts available online).
There is the kind of game it was--a fighting game for the arcade market, both of which were big in the '90s, but have long since gone bust.* However, more fundamental than that is the way that Tattoo Assassins' makers at Data East tried cashing in on the craze--by getting edgy in that EXTREME! '90s way, while also getting ironic in that '90s way. Thus they seized on those aspects that had made Mortal Kombat its own little moral panic, like the fatalities, which were pretty ridiculous to begin with, and made them more so--filling the game with vast numbers of ever more over-the-top finishing moves (2000+ according to the promotion) to the point of making a parody-of-a-parody out of them. This was even before one got to the nudalities so plainly intended to get people jaw-jawing (while, if they were mainly played for shock value and laughs, in tantalizing the audience with the prospect of seeing the digitized actresses playing its female characters in a state of undress those nudalities added a risqué touch befitting the era of Leisure Suit Larry). There was the influence of the tabloid culture that seemed to be swallowing everything up in one of the playable characters being obviously based on ice skater Nancy Kerrigan. (Meanwhile, though this happened only after the production, it seems somehow telling of this aspect of the game and its moment that the actress playing another of the principal characters--Frederick's of Hollywood model Gretchen Stockdale, who played Hannah Hart--in real life ended up in an even more lunatic media frenzy herself when, after getting a call from O.J. Simpson the night of Nicole Brown's murder as she did, she ended up a witness at the trial! So if you wanted you could make a "Nancy Kerrigan clone" fight it out with an "O.J. Simpson trial witness"--which is as '90s as it gets.) There was even a touch of that '70s nostalgia that so obsessed the pop culture makers of the decade, with another playable character a Native American named Billy apparently meant to evoke '70s icon Billy Jack.
So far as I can tell discussion of the game is overwhelmingly sneering in tone, emphasizing the game's derivativeness, and the poor workmanship that was probably unavoidable given the kind of rushed production schedule calling to mind the legend of Atari's adaptation of Steven Spielberg's E.T., as well as the undeniably lowbrow and shameless character of the gimmicks intended to make yet another Mortal Kombat knockoff stand out in a market ever-more crowded with them. Still, even if a good game all this does not make (it may say something that, so far as I know, no one has tried to patch it up and market it to gamers as a novelty if nothing else) it does, in a moment when we have enough distance from the '90s to think of it as having a distinct sensibility, a distinct aesthetic, give Tattoo Assassins an interest as a telling piece of pop cultural history (just like those now long-forgotten Billy Jack movies it evoked).
* It seems that fighting games lost their interest as complicated combat became assimilated into gaming generally--while the gameplay generally became so involved that casual gamers and button-mashers were pretty much shut out (and not just in fighting games). With arcades the issue seems to be that the gaming companies were unable to give the player a more dazzling experience than their home console for that by this point inflated quarter--and also unable to get them to part with more money than that, precipitating their decline.
How Much Money Did Marvel Phase Three Really Make? (A Note on the Recent Revelations About Avengers 3 and 4)
Not long ago I wrote about the extraordinary profitability reported for Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe in Phase Three. Much of that profit was directly produced by the two-part Avengers event consisting of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. The net costs for the two films, respectively, were $775 million and $899 million for the two movies--about $1.7 billion in 2019 terms. Of that some $700 million was spent on the productions, net, not gross, ($325 million and $355 million in current dollars, respectively) with the rest--the other $1 billion!--going to prints, advertising, video release costs, participations, residuals, "off the tops" and interest.
These are staggering sums. But the two films together grossed over $4.8 billion at the box office, which came to over $2 billion in rentals, plus another billion or so from the home entertainment, TV, etc. markets, working out to over $3 billion in overall revenue, and about $1.4 billion in profit. Overall it was a colossal return that made the colossal investment entirely logical in dollars and cents terms even if one thought only in terms of the two movies alone rather than the bigger Marvel money machine, and the boost it gave to other movies in Marvel Phase Three and after. (To cite but one example, Captain Marvel by itself reportedly made over $400 million+ in profit, and this would seem at least partially attributable to its connection with the Avengers event.)
Alas, recently we have seen a stream of reports about how the numbers that reached the press may have understated Disney's outlays on certain projects--like Dr. Strange 2. (The movie cost the studio $100 million more than initially reported, taking a big bite out of the profitability that Deadline calculated in 2022. Subtracting $100 million from its estimated near-$300 million profit would knock it down from being ahead of Black Panther 2 and Jurassic World: Dominion to being safely behind them.)
The facts about Dr. Strange 2 came out because there was a massive British government subsidy to the movie's makers in the form of a cash reimbursement for the expenses they incurred filming in Britain under that government's Film Tax Relief scheme. Getting that money required a public financial statement in which the truth came out.
Now we are hearing similar claims about the Avengers two-parter, also on the basis of the statements filed in the process of getting those British government subsidies. According to these it seems that the production cost, after the aforementioned reimbursement, was not $700 million but $1.2 billion.
Taking these numbers at face value this would mean an extra half billion dollars went into those movies, which now would clearly appear to be the most expensive made in the history of the world.
Of course, even with the half billion subtracted from the aforementioned sum the spectacular $1.4 billion profit ends up a still, frankly spectacular, $900 million profit, even before, again, we think of all the other ways in which the movies' success has contributed to the profitability of the MCU and its owner Disney. But with even Disney's more profitable ventures time and again looking less profitable than before, and the losses from the flops they can less avoid admitting pile up (Disney had a $300 million+ loss from Strange World and Lightyear alone last year, Indiana Jones 5 and other catastrophes this year, without even looking at the troubles the studio has had in the streaming area), it is not the news anyone favorably inclined toward, or invested in, the company wants to hear.
These are staggering sums. But the two films together grossed over $4.8 billion at the box office, which came to over $2 billion in rentals, plus another billion or so from the home entertainment, TV, etc. markets, working out to over $3 billion in overall revenue, and about $1.4 billion in profit. Overall it was a colossal return that made the colossal investment entirely logical in dollars and cents terms even if one thought only in terms of the two movies alone rather than the bigger Marvel money machine, and the boost it gave to other movies in Marvel Phase Three and after. (To cite but one example, Captain Marvel by itself reportedly made over $400 million+ in profit, and this would seem at least partially attributable to its connection with the Avengers event.)
Alas, recently we have seen a stream of reports about how the numbers that reached the press may have understated Disney's outlays on certain projects--like Dr. Strange 2. (The movie cost the studio $100 million more than initially reported, taking a big bite out of the profitability that Deadline calculated in 2022. Subtracting $100 million from its estimated near-$300 million profit would knock it down from being ahead of Black Panther 2 and Jurassic World: Dominion to being safely behind them.)
The facts about Dr. Strange 2 came out because there was a massive British government subsidy to the movie's makers in the form of a cash reimbursement for the expenses they incurred filming in Britain under that government's Film Tax Relief scheme. Getting that money required a public financial statement in which the truth came out.
Now we are hearing similar claims about the Avengers two-parter, also on the basis of the statements filed in the process of getting those British government subsidies. According to these it seems that the production cost, after the aforementioned reimbursement, was not $700 million but $1.2 billion.
Taking these numbers at face value this would mean an extra half billion dollars went into those movies, which now would clearly appear to be the most expensive made in the history of the world.
Of course, even with the half billion subtracted from the aforementioned sum the spectacular $1.4 billion profit ends up a still, frankly spectacular, $900 million profit, even before, again, we think of all the other ways in which the movies' success has contributed to the profitability of the MCU and its owner Disney. But with even Disney's more profitable ventures time and again looking less profitable than before, and the losses from the flops they can less avoid admitting pile up (Disney had a $300 million+ loss from Strange World and Lightyear alone last year, Indiana Jones 5 and other catastrophes this year, without even looking at the troubles the studio has had in the streaming area), it is not the news anyone favorably inclined toward, or invested in, the company wants to hear.
Thursday, August 31, 2023
Why Do So Few Marvel Comics Heroes Wear Capes?
It has been remarked from time to time that DC and Marvel Comics' casts of heroes differ in, among so much else, their propensity for cape-wearing.
DC's most iconic superheroes wear capes--both Superman and Batman certainly doing so. Wonder Woman is less identified with them, but she is far from unknown to wear a cape herself--which means the Justice League's "Big Three" are covered here. And of course one has an easy time coming up with other examples--most obviously figures derivative of or associated with the Big Three, like Superman's fellow arrival from planet Krypton Supergirl (and Powergirl), and Batman's sidekick Robin (and Batgirl and Batwoman), but also the Martian Manhunter (making for at least three routine and four sometime cape-wearers among the seven founders of the Justice League), and Robin's fellow Teen Titan, Raven.1
By contrast capes are less common in the Marvel universe. Among the X-Men, for example, only Storm is apt to be seen wearing one--a single member of the principals on the X-Men team, as against all those Justice League members, while it says something that one could miss the fact given the split design of her particular cape in the version of her appearance most are probably familiar with. (I actually misremembered the cape as a wingsuit until I checked up on the matter for this item.) Thor and Dr. Strange both wear capes, but in fairness they are relatively minor Marvel figures--certainly next to Spider-Man, or the Hulk, or Captain America, or Iron Man, or the members of the Fantastic Four, or Wolverine and the other X-Men, none of whom make a habit of cape-wearing.2 (Indeed, a glance at one recent list of the Marvel cape-wearers confirms this--only the really hardcore fan of superhero comics likely to have even heard of most of those really likely to be seen in a cape, like Moon Knight.)
In fact the more prominent Marvel cape-wearers tend to be villains--like Dr. Doom and Magneto.
Why is that?
My guess is that Marvel in the classic, Silver Age period in which it churned out the superheroes we know it for inclined to more grounded figures--to whom the flamboyant impression made by a cape is less suited. At the same time, probing the possibilities of the superhero form in that way that tends to go with the second, "middle," generation of a genre's life cycle, they hit upon a lot of characters whose wearing a cape would make no sense whatsoever--as with wheelchair-using Charles Xavier, the Hulk-transforming Bruce Banner, or your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man swinging along from webs he shoots out of devices on his wrists (that was how it originally went if you remember those old numbers), while this was even more the case with those cash-in-on-a-trend types like '60s spymania product Nick Fury, or the Mack Bolan-inspired The Punisher.3 There was less such inhibition regarding the villains, where I think there was less aspiration to produce something different from DC's offerings.
1. One might also count the original Green Lantern Alan Scott as yet another cape-wearer, but admittedly people are much more likely to remember Hal Jordan (not usually pictured with a cape), and it is what people usually remember that matters for the purposes of this discussion.
2. Of course, those deeply steeped in comics lore can and do cite instances where, for example, Wolverine did wear a cape, but this was usually so long ago, rare, brief or unusual that it was never properly part of the character's image.
3. I refer here to John Barnes' theory of a three-generation life cycle. Discussed previously on this blog in many a post, you can find it applied to superhero comics specifically here.
DC's most iconic superheroes wear capes--both Superman and Batman certainly doing so. Wonder Woman is less identified with them, but she is far from unknown to wear a cape herself--which means the Justice League's "Big Three" are covered here. And of course one has an easy time coming up with other examples--most obviously figures derivative of or associated with the Big Three, like Superman's fellow arrival from planet Krypton Supergirl (and Powergirl), and Batman's sidekick Robin (and Batgirl and Batwoman), but also the Martian Manhunter (making for at least three routine and four sometime cape-wearers among the seven founders of the Justice League), and Robin's fellow Teen Titan, Raven.1
By contrast capes are less common in the Marvel universe. Among the X-Men, for example, only Storm is apt to be seen wearing one--a single member of the principals on the X-Men team, as against all those Justice League members, while it says something that one could miss the fact given the split design of her particular cape in the version of her appearance most are probably familiar with. (I actually misremembered the cape as a wingsuit until I checked up on the matter for this item.) Thor and Dr. Strange both wear capes, but in fairness they are relatively minor Marvel figures--certainly next to Spider-Man, or the Hulk, or Captain America, or Iron Man, or the members of the Fantastic Four, or Wolverine and the other X-Men, none of whom make a habit of cape-wearing.2 (Indeed, a glance at one recent list of the Marvel cape-wearers confirms this--only the really hardcore fan of superhero comics likely to have even heard of most of those really likely to be seen in a cape, like Moon Knight.)
In fact the more prominent Marvel cape-wearers tend to be villains--like Dr. Doom and Magneto.
Why is that?
My guess is that Marvel in the classic, Silver Age period in which it churned out the superheroes we know it for inclined to more grounded figures--to whom the flamboyant impression made by a cape is less suited. At the same time, probing the possibilities of the superhero form in that way that tends to go with the second, "middle," generation of a genre's life cycle, they hit upon a lot of characters whose wearing a cape would make no sense whatsoever--as with wheelchair-using Charles Xavier, the Hulk-transforming Bruce Banner, or your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man swinging along from webs he shoots out of devices on his wrists (that was how it originally went if you remember those old numbers), while this was even more the case with those cash-in-on-a-trend types like '60s spymania product Nick Fury, or the Mack Bolan-inspired The Punisher.3 There was less such inhibition regarding the villains, where I think there was less aspiration to produce something different from DC's offerings.
1. One might also count the original Green Lantern Alan Scott as yet another cape-wearer, but admittedly people are much more likely to remember Hal Jordan (not usually pictured with a cape), and it is what people usually remember that matters for the purposes of this discussion.
2. Of course, those deeply steeped in comics lore can and do cite instances where, for example, Wolverine did wear a cape, but this was usually so long ago, rare, brief or unusual that it was never properly part of the character's image.
3. I refer here to John Barnes' theory of a three-generation life cycle. Discussed previously on this blog in many a post, you can find it applied to superhero comics specifically here.
John Barnes' Three-Generation Life Cycle for Creative Genres and the Superhero Comic
Ever since first encountering John Barnes' theory of the three generation life cycle of a creative genre a decade and a half ago I have found it handy indeed in considering the state of many an aspect of recent cultural life.* Certainly it was much on my mind as I considered the state of science fiction back when I wrote "The End of Science Fiction?"--and it has seemed to me worth citing as well where the genre of spy fiction has been concerned.
To put it very briefly, in the first generation of the genre's life cycle artists discover something new and give us the founding classics that defined the genre, established an audience, produced a conversation and in time a tradition. The second generation finds all this very firmly in place and, maybe sensing that it is in need of a shake-up, and guided by critical reassessment of the old classics, locates and exploits a good many unrealized potentials. The third generation is less concerned with innovation, of which there is less possibility (the law of diminishing returns is most certainly operative here), than "doing it well" as it turns into "inside joke . . . treasured family story . . . or a set of exercises in which to display virtuosity." Afterward the genre passes out of life into "afterlife," in which people may go on enjoying it, and even producing in it, but in which very little new or significant can be expected to appear, the essential ideas and range of the form, the essential "canon" of works pretty much settled and not much added.
This seems to me to apply to the superhero comic just as it does to the histories of those other genres I discussed. I think of the first generation of the genre as that "Golden Age" heyday of DC Comics which gave us such foundational figures as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and other Justice League stalwarts. I think of that "Silver Age" where Marvel really made its mark as thoroughly "second generation"--Stan Lee and Jack Kirby doing what DC had not done in deciding to situate their characters in the real city of New York rather than some analog like Gotham, in giving them "everyday problems" in that way most associated with Spider-Man, in the stress on younger heroes like Peter Parker and the original students at Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and so on. (I think we can see something of this, too, when we consider Green Lantern's trajectory in the 1970s.) And when I look at later figures like the great Alan Moore, in whose works the superhero comic most certainly seems a matter of "inside joke," "treasured family story" and "exercise in which to display virtuosity," I definitely find myself feeling that superhero comics had moved into their third generation by the '80s--four decades ago.
The implication is that at this point super hero comics are well into the "afterlife" phase. This may seem an overly pessimistic assessment, but just think about it-- what have we really seen since the '80s that you would really consider transformative within American superhero comics? I certainly cannot think of a thing--though anyone who can think of something is, as always, welcome to offer their thoughts in the comment thread.
* The theory, which Barnes laid out in his essay "Reading for the Undead" in the defunct Helix magazine, unfortunately does not seem to be available anywhere, only secondary comment about it--like Sean Wilcox's BFS Journal essay "Reading John Barnes' 'Reading for the Undead'" (which ran in 2018), and of course my own uses of Barnes' concept.
To put it very briefly, in the first generation of the genre's life cycle artists discover something new and give us the founding classics that defined the genre, established an audience, produced a conversation and in time a tradition. The second generation finds all this very firmly in place and, maybe sensing that it is in need of a shake-up, and guided by critical reassessment of the old classics, locates and exploits a good many unrealized potentials. The third generation is less concerned with innovation, of which there is less possibility (the law of diminishing returns is most certainly operative here), than "doing it well" as it turns into "inside joke . . . treasured family story . . . or a set of exercises in which to display virtuosity." Afterward the genre passes out of life into "afterlife," in which people may go on enjoying it, and even producing in it, but in which very little new or significant can be expected to appear, the essential ideas and range of the form, the essential "canon" of works pretty much settled and not much added.
This seems to me to apply to the superhero comic just as it does to the histories of those other genres I discussed. I think of the first generation of the genre as that "Golden Age" heyday of DC Comics which gave us such foundational figures as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and other Justice League stalwarts. I think of that "Silver Age" where Marvel really made its mark as thoroughly "second generation"--Stan Lee and Jack Kirby doing what DC had not done in deciding to situate their characters in the real city of New York rather than some analog like Gotham, in giving them "everyday problems" in that way most associated with Spider-Man, in the stress on younger heroes like Peter Parker and the original students at Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and so on. (I think we can see something of this, too, when we consider Green Lantern's trajectory in the 1970s.) And when I look at later figures like the great Alan Moore, in whose works the superhero comic most certainly seems a matter of "inside joke," "treasured family story" and "exercise in which to display virtuosity," I definitely find myself feeling that superhero comics had moved into their third generation by the '80s--four decades ago.
The implication is that at this point super hero comics are well into the "afterlife" phase. This may seem an overly pessimistic assessment, but just think about it-- what have we really seen since the '80s that you would really consider transformative within American superhero comics? I certainly cannot think of a thing--though anyone who can think of something is, as always, welcome to offer their thoughts in the comment thread.
* The theory, which Barnes laid out in his essay "Reading for the Undead" in the defunct Helix magazine, unfortunately does not seem to be available anywhere, only secondary comment about it--like Sean Wilcox's BFS Journal essay "Reading John Barnes' 'Reading for the Undead'" (which ran in 2018), and of course my own uses of Barnes' concept.
Tuesday, August 29, 2023
The Summer 2023 Box Office: Just How Did the Predictions Fare?
This summer I discussed a good many predictions about how various films would fare at the box office--and made a few predictions of my own. These included eight predictions I offered in advance of the film's release, in which I also explained my reasoning at some length. Some of the movies I made predictions about have already all but disappeared from theaters, their runs over, while the others discussed here (the last of which was mid-July's Mission: Impossible 7) do not have much further to go, the matter of their performance almost as settled. The result is that it is not too soon to consider how those predictions fared--and to that end this post revisits the predictions I made about those eight films.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3
On the basis of the grosses of the prior two Guardians of the Galaxy films one would have expected the third film to also be a billion-dollar hit--but the trend of the grosses of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)'s various series has been downward, with new sequels making between three-quarters and half what the preceding films in their series' did. Adjusting that billion dollar hit expectation for that reality I projected a $700 million global gross for Guardians--and in the wake of the disappointing opening weekend wondered if the film would not do worse than that. The second weekend, however, hinted at strong enough legs that the film could go a little higher--perhaps as high as $875 million. In the end the movie made $846 million--not too far outside the range I predicted pre-release, and certainly not so much so as to really defy the trend from which Marvel's releases had been suffering through the prior year (the movie's take in the end a rough fifth down from what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 scored in real terms).
Fast X
Working in the same manner as before (the inflation-adjusted grosses of prior series films, the downward trend in those grosses) I estimated that Fast X would pull in $750-$850 million. The movie made $705 million--performing a little below the bottom end of the range here.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Considering Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse I was, I think, more optimistic than I was about any of the summer's other movies, partly because of the evidences of audience anticipation. I in fact suggested that the movie, which Boxoffice Pro early on estimated would break the $300 million barrier in North America alone, could be the biggest superhero film of the year. I was less bullish on the movie's overseas performance, excitement elsewhere not quite as easy to detect. Still, I saw the plausible range of its global gross as $500-$750 million (with the low end mainly defined by the sequel's doing no better than the original).
As it happened, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse grossed a sensational $380 million in North America (close to twice the gross of the original Into the Spider-Verse), and a respectable $688 million worldwide. In the process it beat Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (and The Flash) to at least be the #1 superhero movie of 2023 in the North American market, while if doing less well than Star-Lord overseas, still posting a higher real-terms gross than the film that began the series (hence, the extra $300 million+ from the international market).
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
My expectation regarding the latest Transformers film was a gross in the $300-$450 million range (with this so much consistent with the downward trend of the series that the decision to make an additional $200 million Transformers film seemed to me incomprehensible). The film, which in North America had the benefit of an opening weekend a bit stronger than the very low expectations held for it, has at least avoided the worst, but not done much better than approach the upper end of the range--with some $439 million collected globally.
The Flash
Initially considering the performance of The Flash I mostly went by whether others' guesses seemed plausible. Originally seeming to tend toward the $700 million range this seemed a safe enough anticipation for a big DCEU movie getting a big summer release. Still, as the hype for the movie as "the greatest superhero movie ever made" built I gave the matter a little thought--comparing the guess with how other DCEU films had done. I was simply unable to see this one breaking the billion-dollar barrier, with $750-$850 million seeming the plausible range at my most optimistic. Of course, the expectations for the film collapsed quickly, in part because of what the box office tracking showed, and my estimate just before the opening weekend was down to $300-$550 million. As it happened, the low end of the range was only slightly optimistic (the movie having $269 million grossed to date) in the weakest performance of any of the movies discussed here, and what has proven a debacle for the DCEU.
Elemental
In contrast with the high expectations surrounding many of the films that were badly disappointed this year (epitomized by The Flash) Elemental arrived with expectations that were none too impressive, with the high end of Boxoffice Pro's projection not seeing the movie break $100 million domestically. Still, extrapolating from prior Disney films' performance I speculated that the film might, with decent legs and a stronger reception overseas than in the domestic market (more "concept-heavy" movies tend to do better internationally than in North America) it might do better than that. The result was a plausible range of $250-$450 million, give or take. As it happened, Elemental has had very good legs indeed (in North America thus far taking in over five times its opening weekend gross, such that here the gross stands at $152 million), while indeed having that robust international performance (making twice as much money overseas as it did in North America). The result is that the film has slightly bettered the upper end of the range I predicted (with $469 million collected so far)--which is not quite enough to have Disney crowing, but should put the extreme pessimism about it into perspective (especially given how well Disney tends to do in home entertainment, which may let it even turn a profit).
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
On the basis of the prior four films performance I suggested $1 billion as the likely gross of Indiana Jones 5, with a quarter-billion dollar margin of error ($750 million-$1.25 billion), but already in April I declared the possibility of a Solo-like collapse (instead of the narrative that it would play like Top Gun 2 that some of the claqueurs were pushing). The Solo scenario seemed to me much more plausible after the bungled premiere of the film at Cannes, and the way the promotional effort ran out of steam afterwards, such that by opening weekend Solo was what I had come to expect. And indeed the film played like Solo in current dollar terms, falling short of the $400 million mark ($381 million taken in after almost two months in the theaters)--and adjusted for inflation, actually did worse. The result is that, to go by the available data, only Indiana Jones 5 compares with The Flash as a disaster for the studios this year.
Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning, Part One
Working on the basis of prior films' performance and tracking--with it seeming possible that the Tom Cruise film would get a bump from the good will toward last summer's Top Gun 2 (compensating for a likely weaker performance in the important Chinese market this time around) I estimated that the global gross for Mission: Impossible 7 would be in the $850-$950 million range. As things stand the film has, after seven weeks in release with not much further to go, taken in just $174 million domestically and $552 million worldwide. This is not just a much weaker showing than I earlier anticipated, but when adjusted for inflation a new low for the series, both the domestic and the global revenue lower than the gross for the movie that was the previous low, 2006's Mission: Impossible III. (The result is that it seems to me that this was the one time this summer when, even just before release, I was so wide off the mark.)
Of course, big a part of this summer's box office as these eight films were they were not the whole of it--or even the totality of the films I discussed. Still, I only discussed The Little Mermaid after its rather dismaying opening weekend. (My expectation then was that it would make $300-$350 million domestically, $500-$700 million worldwide. The movie's performance has been in line with the low end of that prediction--just $298 million grossed in North America, $569 million worldwide--which is more than Elemental made, but an undeniable letdown in comparison with the prior live-action adaptations of Disney's animated classics.) I discussed Barbie and Oppenheimer, but attempted no number-crunching in regard to these films, which lack convenient points of comparison. (Certainly, though, I did not expect Barbie to break the billion-dollar barrier--I had thought this likely beyond any live-action movie this year, and the expectation of that only grew as one likely candidate after another flopped. I did express some skepticism about Oppenheimer's legs given its "arty" filmmaking style--indeed, suggested there might be a collapse in attendance after the first weekend--but it has held up pretty well, with the movie now on the way to quadrupling its opening weekend gross, giving it $299 million in North America and $778 million globally.) And I did give some thought to how Blue Beetle might do (suggesting it might do a bit better than it was credited with, a prediction that now seems validated, even as the film still looks like it will lose money).
The result is that, while I do not think I did too badly with the estimates, this summer has certainly had its share of surprises for onlookers--those movies that should have been the most reliable performers consistently letting down their backers, while a few of those less conventional releases (the animated Spider-Man, Barbie, Oppenheimer) often performed spectacularly. Indeed, when in a few days we are in a position to consider the summer season as a whole we are likely to conclude that, amid a generally disappointing season, those riskier picks rescued the summer from disaster.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3
On the basis of the grosses of the prior two Guardians of the Galaxy films one would have expected the third film to also be a billion-dollar hit--but the trend of the grosses of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)'s various series has been downward, with new sequels making between three-quarters and half what the preceding films in their series' did. Adjusting that billion dollar hit expectation for that reality I projected a $700 million global gross for Guardians--and in the wake of the disappointing opening weekend wondered if the film would not do worse than that. The second weekend, however, hinted at strong enough legs that the film could go a little higher--perhaps as high as $875 million. In the end the movie made $846 million--not too far outside the range I predicted pre-release, and certainly not so much so as to really defy the trend from which Marvel's releases had been suffering through the prior year (the movie's take in the end a rough fifth down from what Guardians of the Galaxy 2 scored in real terms).
Fast X
Working in the same manner as before (the inflation-adjusted grosses of prior series films, the downward trend in those grosses) I estimated that Fast X would pull in $750-$850 million. The movie made $705 million--performing a little below the bottom end of the range here.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Considering Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse I was, I think, more optimistic than I was about any of the summer's other movies, partly because of the evidences of audience anticipation. I in fact suggested that the movie, which Boxoffice Pro early on estimated would break the $300 million barrier in North America alone, could be the biggest superhero film of the year. I was less bullish on the movie's overseas performance, excitement elsewhere not quite as easy to detect. Still, I saw the plausible range of its global gross as $500-$750 million (with the low end mainly defined by the sequel's doing no better than the original).
As it happened, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse grossed a sensational $380 million in North America (close to twice the gross of the original Into the Spider-Verse), and a respectable $688 million worldwide. In the process it beat Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (and The Flash) to at least be the #1 superhero movie of 2023 in the North American market, while if doing less well than Star-Lord overseas, still posting a higher real-terms gross than the film that began the series (hence, the extra $300 million+ from the international market).
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
My expectation regarding the latest Transformers film was a gross in the $300-$450 million range (with this so much consistent with the downward trend of the series that the decision to make an additional $200 million Transformers film seemed to me incomprehensible). The film, which in North America had the benefit of an opening weekend a bit stronger than the very low expectations held for it, has at least avoided the worst, but not done much better than approach the upper end of the range--with some $439 million collected globally.
The Flash
Initially considering the performance of The Flash I mostly went by whether others' guesses seemed plausible. Originally seeming to tend toward the $700 million range this seemed a safe enough anticipation for a big DCEU movie getting a big summer release. Still, as the hype for the movie as "the greatest superhero movie ever made" built I gave the matter a little thought--comparing the guess with how other DCEU films had done. I was simply unable to see this one breaking the billion-dollar barrier, with $750-$850 million seeming the plausible range at my most optimistic. Of course, the expectations for the film collapsed quickly, in part because of what the box office tracking showed, and my estimate just before the opening weekend was down to $300-$550 million. As it happened, the low end of the range was only slightly optimistic (the movie having $269 million grossed to date) in the weakest performance of any of the movies discussed here, and what has proven a debacle for the DCEU.
Elemental
In contrast with the high expectations surrounding many of the films that were badly disappointed this year (epitomized by The Flash) Elemental arrived with expectations that were none too impressive, with the high end of Boxoffice Pro's projection not seeing the movie break $100 million domestically. Still, extrapolating from prior Disney films' performance I speculated that the film might, with decent legs and a stronger reception overseas than in the domestic market (more "concept-heavy" movies tend to do better internationally than in North America) it might do better than that. The result was a plausible range of $250-$450 million, give or take. As it happened, Elemental has had very good legs indeed (in North America thus far taking in over five times its opening weekend gross, such that here the gross stands at $152 million), while indeed having that robust international performance (making twice as much money overseas as it did in North America). The result is that the film has slightly bettered the upper end of the range I predicted (with $469 million collected so far)--which is not quite enough to have Disney crowing, but should put the extreme pessimism about it into perspective (especially given how well Disney tends to do in home entertainment, which may let it even turn a profit).
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
On the basis of the prior four films performance I suggested $1 billion as the likely gross of Indiana Jones 5, with a quarter-billion dollar margin of error ($750 million-$1.25 billion), but already in April I declared the possibility of a Solo-like collapse (instead of the narrative that it would play like Top Gun 2 that some of the claqueurs were pushing). The Solo scenario seemed to me much more plausible after the bungled premiere of the film at Cannes, and the way the promotional effort ran out of steam afterwards, such that by opening weekend Solo was what I had come to expect. And indeed the film played like Solo in current dollar terms, falling short of the $400 million mark ($381 million taken in after almost two months in the theaters)--and adjusted for inflation, actually did worse. The result is that, to go by the available data, only Indiana Jones 5 compares with The Flash as a disaster for the studios this year.
Mission: Impossible--Dead Reckoning, Part One
Working on the basis of prior films' performance and tracking--with it seeming possible that the Tom Cruise film would get a bump from the good will toward last summer's Top Gun 2 (compensating for a likely weaker performance in the important Chinese market this time around) I estimated that the global gross for Mission: Impossible 7 would be in the $850-$950 million range. As things stand the film has, after seven weeks in release with not much further to go, taken in just $174 million domestically and $552 million worldwide. This is not just a much weaker showing than I earlier anticipated, but when adjusted for inflation a new low for the series, both the domestic and the global revenue lower than the gross for the movie that was the previous low, 2006's Mission: Impossible III. (The result is that it seems to me that this was the one time this summer when, even just before release, I was so wide off the mark.)
Of course, big a part of this summer's box office as these eight films were they were not the whole of it--or even the totality of the films I discussed. Still, I only discussed The Little Mermaid after its rather dismaying opening weekend. (My expectation then was that it would make $300-$350 million domestically, $500-$700 million worldwide. The movie's performance has been in line with the low end of that prediction--just $298 million grossed in North America, $569 million worldwide--which is more than Elemental made, but an undeniable letdown in comparison with the prior live-action adaptations of Disney's animated classics.) I discussed Barbie and Oppenheimer, but attempted no number-crunching in regard to these films, which lack convenient points of comparison. (Certainly, though, I did not expect Barbie to break the billion-dollar barrier--I had thought this likely beyond any live-action movie this year, and the expectation of that only grew as one likely candidate after another flopped. I did express some skepticism about Oppenheimer's legs given its "arty" filmmaking style--indeed, suggested there might be a collapse in attendance after the first weekend--but it has held up pretty well, with the movie now on the way to quadrupling its opening weekend gross, giving it $299 million in North America and $778 million globally.) And I did give some thought to how Blue Beetle might do (suggesting it might do a bit better than it was credited with, a prediction that now seems validated, even as the film still looks like it will lose money).
The result is that, while I do not think I did too badly with the estimates, this summer has certainly had its share of surprises for onlookers--those movies that should have been the most reliable performers consistently letting down their backers, while a few of those less conventional releases (the animated Spider-Man, Barbie, Oppenheimer) often performed spectacularly. Indeed, when in a few days we are in a position to consider the summer season as a whole we are likely to conclude that, amid a generally disappointing season, those riskier picks rescued the summer from disaster.
Monday, August 28, 2023
How is Blue Beetle Doing Ten Days into its Release?
The box office prospects of Blue Beetle from the start were fairly modest--the movie a straight-to-streaming project that, unlike its fellow straight-to-streaming DCEU project Batgirl, was upgraded for theatrical release rather than buried, and even after that no Guardians of the Galaxy 3 or The Flash were competitiveness at the summer box office was concerned. Moreover, to a degree that was almost certainly unanticipated when the decision to give Blue Beetle a theatrical release was made, superhero fatigue, franchise fatigue, and general "blockbuster" fatigue all bit hard in 2023--with Ant-Man 3 and Shazam 2 both proving early losers, and the flops just continuing to come through the summer with the latest installments of the Fast and Furious, Transformers, the DCEU, Indiana Jones and even Mission: Impossible.
The result was that the early tracking numbers for Blue Beetle looked paltry indeed--four weeks in advance of the movie's debut Boxoffice Pro projecting a $12-$17 million opening weekend on the way to a $27-$55 million gross over the fuller domestic run, numbers that would have been disappointing in regard to the mere opening day of a much-awaited superhero blockbuster pre-pandemic. Of course, things did look up after, with Boxoffice Pro's projection for Blue Beetle rising to $20-$27 million for the opening weekend and $45-$87 million for the fuller run by the August 10 reassessment. Proportionately a significant upward revision, it was still from a very low starting point—and even the high end of the range well short of the $100 million mark.
As it happened the film, with a gross in the upper limit of the range Boxoffice Pro envisaged for its opening weekend ($25 million), and displayed decent legs in its second weekend (with a mere 49 percent drop in its second weekend), has justified the improved projection--but not done much more than that. At the same time it has been no great sensation overseas (57 percent of the worldwide box office gross to date accounted for domestically).
The result is that it will have a tough time just making its money back--even after taking into account post-theatrical income. With $25 million collected on opening weekend and $46 million in the first ten days one can, given reasonable optimism about the pattern seen to date continuing, picture the movie tripling its opening weekend gross, or making two-thirds more money than it already has--which works out to a final domestic tally of $75 million or so by either calculation. Continuing to account for 57 percent of the global gross this suggests a worldwide take in the $130 million range. Should the film do a little better than this--actually make the $87 million Boxoffice Pro anticipated, and eventually match its domestic gross overseas--it would still have only $175 million collected.
Now consider the formula I have presented here on the basis of Deadline's recent data. The share of the gross that goes to the production comes to, perhaps, half--which works out to $65-$90 million in rentals. For a lower-grossing film like this it is not inconceivable that the home entertainment, TV, streaming income will match or even slightly exceed the theatrical rentals, so let us say generously that counting this in the movie better than doubles its theatrical rentals with a $140-$200 million take from all those sources.
Now consider what we know of what was spent--the reported production budget of $120 million. Counting in the costs of publicity, distribution and the rest of what is not strictly "production" we tend to get 2-3 times the outlay for the production, which works out to, let us say, $240-$360 million (unless the backers really skimped). The result is that even should the film do well within the parameters discussed here the project could be tens of millions in the hole--while the less bullish scenarios have the movie losing its backers a good deal more than tens of millions. Still, even in the worst-case scenario this movie is unlikely to be accounted a major flop in the year that has also seen The Flash and Indiana Jones 5.
The result was that the early tracking numbers for Blue Beetle looked paltry indeed--four weeks in advance of the movie's debut Boxoffice Pro projecting a $12-$17 million opening weekend on the way to a $27-$55 million gross over the fuller domestic run, numbers that would have been disappointing in regard to the mere opening day of a much-awaited superhero blockbuster pre-pandemic. Of course, things did look up after, with Boxoffice Pro's projection for Blue Beetle rising to $20-$27 million for the opening weekend and $45-$87 million for the fuller run by the August 10 reassessment. Proportionately a significant upward revision, it was still from a very low starting point—and even the high end of the range well short of the $100 million mark.
As it happened the film, with a gross in the upper limit of the range Boxoffice Pro envisaged for its opening weekend ($25 million), and displayed decent legs in its second weekend (with a mere 49 percent drop in its second weekend), has justified the improved projection--but not done much more than that. At the same time it has been no great sensation overseas (57 percent of the worldwide box office gross to date accounted for domestically).
The result is that it will have a tough time just making its money back--even after taking into account post-theatrical income. With $25 million collected on opening weekend and $46 million in the first ten days one can, given reasonable optimism about the pattern seen to date continuing, picture the movie tripling its opening weekend gross, or making two-thirds more money than it already has--which works out to a final domestic tally of $75 million or so by either calculation. Continuing to account for 57 percent of the global gross this suggests a worldwide take in the $130 million range. Should the film do a little better than this--actually make the $87 million Boxoffice Pro anticipated, and eventually match its domestic gross overseas--it would still have only $175 million collected.
Now consider the formula I have presented here on the basis of Deadline's recent data. The share of the gross that goes to the production comes to, perhaps, half--which works out to $65-$90 million in rentals. For a lower-grossing film like this it is not inconceivable that the home entertainment, TV, streaming income will match or even slightly exceed the theatrical rentals, so let us say generously that counting this in the movie better than doubles its theatrical rentals with a $140-$200 million take from all those sources.
Now consider what we know of what was spent--the reported production budget of $120 million. Counting in the costs of publicity, distribution and the rest of what is not strictly "production" we tend to get 2-3 times the outlay for the production, which works out to, let us say, $240-$360 million (unless the backers really skimped). The result is that even should the film do well within the parameters discussed here the project could be tens of millions in the hole--while the less bullish scenarios have the movie losing its backers a good deal more than tens of millions. Still, even in the worst-case scenario this movie is unlikely to be accounted a major flop in the year that has also seen The Flash and Indiana Jones 5.
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.
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.
Sunday, July 30, 2023
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, July 23, 2023
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.
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.
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.
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