The Lies They Told the Self-Published

I'm not quite sure how things stand here these days, but back when self-publishing exploded circa 2010 the writer who endeavored to go this route was beaten over the head with the "advice" that they absolutely must make great and strenuous efforts to publicize their book if they are to have any hope of anyone reading their book at all.

As with most of the advice directed toward the self-published this was less about guiding them toward a course that would let them have the fairest possible chance than crushing their hopes of self-publication being a viable alternative to the traditional publication channels out of which they had likely found themselves already completely shut out (because the means are beyond them, or the process so distasteful or unbearable)--or to foist on them very expensive services of dubious value.

As one might guess, the advice tended to be dishonest, in the small as in the large.

Consider how such writers were enjoined to get their work "reviewed."

The truth is that they did not need "reviews." A merely good review, after all, would not necessarily do much for them, while a bad review would be damaging--quite enough, perhaps, to neutralize the effect of many positive reviews.

No, what they needed rather than reviews was claquing--not reviewers, but claqueurs. Big publishers can arrange these--and do so all the time, going by the raves one sees all the time on the covers of mediocre works. They do not necessarily have to work all that hard for it--the established author likely to be treated much more generously than the newcomer for a multitude of reasons, as their failings are given the benefit of the doubt, and the critics jump on the bandwagon, in a way that cannot happen with a "nobody," who was likely to naively send out their work to such obscure reviewers as they could get to look at it, and merely land luke-warm responses--and, reflecting how much more they needed the claquing than did the already established, the less than luke-warm sales to show for them.

Could Captain Marvel 2 be the Marvel Cinematic Universe's The Flash?

In the last several franchise sequel-packed, and flop-packed, years we have time and again seen mighty movie franchises put out a very big movie with very high expectations that performs disastrously. Thus did it go with the Star Wars franchise with the summer of 2018's Solo--the flopping of which stopped Disney's Star Wars movie machine cold, not a single new Star Wars movie released since but the conclusion to the new trilogy, and likely none appearing until 2025, all as Kathleen Kennedy speaks of shifting Star Wars over from a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style machine to a far lower rate James Bond-type machine (interestingly, as the Bond movie production rate falls to unprecedented lows) in a confession of the old vision's failure. Subsequently that other great George Lucas-created franchise, Indiana Jones, has come to an ignominious end (for now) with Dial of Destiny (unhappily realizing my anticipation of its being that series' own Solo). And if it the DC Extended Universe had already had enough (lesser) disappointments that a highly touted reboot had already been loudly announced, and talked up by les claqueurs, The Flash may be said to have been an equivalent catastrophe.

The result is that I find myself wondering--could Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels) be to the Marvel Cinematic Universe what Solo was to Star Wars, what Indiana Jones 5 was to that series, what The Flash has been to the DCEU? Compared with when I made my prediction about The Marvels four months ago, at the beginning rather than the end of the franchise flop-packed summer of 2023, I see even less reason than before for optimism about the performance of superhero sequels like this one, whether from the DCEU, Marvel or anywhere else. Yet the fact remains that my estimate for The Marvels was already fairly low to begin with--premised on what the Black Panther franchise suffered in its theatrical revenues from the first to the second film, a drop of perhaps half in the "real" worldwide box office gross not inconceivable, leaving it with $600-$700 million collected.

Since that time I have seen no reason to think the film will do much better--while certain of the disadvantages it is likely to have are clearer. The film's shift in tone to something goofier than what its predecessors offered may not go over well with audiences (it is the kind of thing that tends to bespeak a run-down series, and very likely did not help Thor 4), while the crossover element can be awkward for people who did not see (or saw but did not like) the associated series--and this all counting the more at a time when viewers are less enthusiastic than before about moviegoing, more fickle in regard to movies that just a short time ago were nearly sure-fire "events." The result is that I do think a Solo/Indiana Jones 5/The Flash-style collapse (the movie's doing less than the $600-$700 million I anticipated, the movie maybe doing just half that business) is not wildly implausible--though of course we will know more in a few weeks, when the box office tracking starts to come in.

For an updated view of the issue, see the author's latest on Captain Marvel 2's prospects.

How Much Would Captain Marvel 2 Need to Make to be Profitable?

We now hear that Captain Marvel 2's production may have run Disney some $275 million, including $220 million "net" (the part that came from the producer)--a hefty sum, and likely just the beginning where its expenses are concerned. Already $45 million more in current dollars than the first Captain Marvel at that stage of things, Disney's final expenditure on Captain Marvel (what we get counting distribution, promotion, participation, residuals, interest all the way through home entertainment), should we take the Deadline figures about the movie from back in 2020 at face value, came to a little over $450 million (an extra $275 million on top of the $175 million production cost).

Extrapolating from Disney's production cost, this would work out to some $560-$570 million for Captain Marvel 2.

Going by what Deadline has reported about previous films of comparable scale and type, with $560 million spent Disney needs to make at least 55 percent of that sum theatrically--$300 million+--just to cover the rest of the outlay with earnings from streaming, home entertainment, etc.. With the film's backers keeping a bit less than half of the theatrical gross I would not expect the movie to break even much below $650 million grossed worldwide, assuming commensurately strong revenue from the post-theatrical income streams.

At the beginning of this past summer movie season it seemed to me that $700 million was the high end of what the movie could be expected to make--given how Marvel's sequels have underperformed relative to their predecessors, and given how the first Captain Marvel was something of a special event (among other things, coming out mere weeks before the mega-event that was Endgame), making it more likely to suffer the drop of a Black Panther sequel than a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel. Nothing I have seen so far has made me much more optimistic about the movie's earnings prospects. The result is that I can see the movie squeaking by in the most favorable scenario, but not much more (that $1 billion mark still likely to be well out of reach), with underperformance easily translating to losses--losses that, while unhappy for the studio, are unlikely to look very significant next to what it has suffered in the wake of Indiana Jones 5's ignominious reception.

On Captain Marvel 2's Budget

Another day, another revelation that makes Disney's finances look even worse than before--with, once again, Disney-Marvel's milking of the British government's system for subsidizing movies leading to the public disclosure at the root of it.

The latest has to do with the outlay for Captain Marvel 2, with some fuss now being made over Forbes' reporting the budget as $275 million, a number touted as twice what had previously been announced--the $130 million figure we heard back in April.

However, as anyone who actually read the reports back in the spring should have registered, the claim was not that the whole project cost $130 million, but that (as the title of Forbes' own April piece put it!) the production company had spent "$130 Million Two Months into Filming." The result was that, especially as $130 million seemed paltry for a Marvel movie--especially a follow-up to the big-budgeted and high-grossing Captain Marvel, especially in this age of inflation, interest rate hike- and pandemic disruption-related production budget--and so I never took it for more than part of the total sum, to be revealed later.*

Accordingly the $275 million figure we are now hearing strikes me not as some scandal, but as completely unsurprising. (In fact it seems less surprising after those other revelations we heard about what Marvel's most recent movies cost, like the far-greater sum--$1.2 billion!--spent on Avengers 3 and 4.)

And of course, the $275 million figure fails to take into account the $55 million subsidy that is, after all, how we got to hear about all this, lowering the net production cost to the vicinity of $220 million.

The fuss thus seems to me a testament to the lack of basic reading skills among those who pass for journalists in this day and age--and, in fairness, also to the way many seem to be reveling in the way that Disney has gone from being Hollywood's champion in the '10s to looking like it is in dire straits.

* The production of the first Captain Marvel cost Disney $175 million net according to Deadline. Perhaps an underestimate (given how Deadline's figures have been consistently low next to the figures we now hear about) it is equal to around $210 million today--way more than that $130 million we heard about, even before inflation, but not much less than the $220 million net production cost of the new movie.

What Happened to All the Paperbacks?

If you have recently visited any major retailers with which you have been long familiar--a supermarket or convenience store, for instance--you may have noticed that the mass-market paperback section has shrunk, or even been eliminated altogether.

This is no isolated oddity--and no great mystery, either. The sales of mass-market paperbacks have not been eroding, but collapsing, for years. It was thus only a matter of time before retailers started cutting back on the space allotted them--or stopped carrying them altogether.

It is also not hard to imagine why this has been the case--and the explanation is not the triumph of the e-book, which, while probably affecting the kind of light, casual reading the paperback is associated with more than any other, e-book sales plateaued some time before the paperback collapse even began. (Sales of e-books were stalling out circa 2015--whereas the analysis I have found dates the paperback collapse to 2017, well after that point.)

The stagnation of the e-book, and the collapse of the paperback, if undeniably multifactor events, testify to what is, as with so much else in the world today, obvious and intuitive and yet something that self-anointed respectable opinion absolutely refuses to admit--that people are doing less reading of novels for pleasure, and less long-form reading of any kind, and maybe less reading of any kind. And this bespeaks the even more complete collapse of such reading--because if the light stuff is "too much" for people, and ceases to be part of their lives, you can forget their getting around to picking up very much in the way of "literature."

Let's Talk Honestly About Rewriting For Once

One of the things that makes what the Internet has degenerated into so useless is that, far from being an open field for ideas we were promised it has become so totally organized around selling crap.

The crap in question includes cheerfully glib advice of the self-helpish variety.

So does it go with, for example, the advice one is likely to found online regarding the matter of rewriting.

Those who have ever attempted to write seriously know full well that rewriting is a part of writing--usually a very important part.

But they also know that many writers--I suspect, the great majority of them--do not particularly enjoy rewriting, quickly come to find it actually painful, and have only a limited patience for it. Indeed, I suspect that far more than will admit it would love to never do it again--to just crank out the words and be done with them, with cleaning up the resulting mess someone else's responsibility (as was often the case with the pulp writers back when making a living selling fiction to magazines was "a thing," as I suspect is the case with those Big Names of today that the Dauriats of Park Avenue are prepared to indulge in this way).

The combination of the importance of rewriting, with its associated difficulties and stresses, makes it a subject worth discussing honestly. But consistent with the aforementioned uselessness an online search for discussion of this matter leads you instead to either

1. Stupid denials of the reality. (Thus do people say things like "You don't like rewriting? Why, I've never heard of such a thing! I personally LOVE REWRITING! So, no I don't understand it at all." Or they say "You think you hate rewriting? No, you only think you don't like rewriting. The reality is you love it, you just don't know it yet!" before trying and failing to change your mind.)

or

2. "Advice" that persons of even modest intelligence probably thought of long before anyone told them, will quickly hear a hundred times if they do any looking into the subject, and which is unlikely to have enough practical value at all to have been worth suggesting the first time, let alone the hundredth. ("Try to think of rewriting as writing!" Okay. Except that if you think of rewriting as something other than what it actually is, how likely are you to go about the task properly?)

I write this post in the hopes of providing something a little more useful--though I know full well that the search engines will probably do neither I, nor any readers who might actually find this item useful, any favors in the search rankings, much more likely burying it under a city dump's worth of stupid denials and "advice" I have been talking about. Still, here is what I have to say about the matter:

A great many people dislike and even hate rewriting, and if we do not admit that key fact we will never get anywhere. This is, partly, because much of the writing we do we do not because we want to, but because we have to (and if, like myself, you have ever had to teach writing you will see how much patience people have for that).

However, even when there is no such element of compulsion people still dislike rewriting--and it is easier to understand why when considering what those who like writing like about it. What, I think, people who love writing love is the experience of the words flowing out of their brains and onto the page, during which they may actually experience a "flow state" in the sense in which psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used the term.

Rewriting is not necessarily like that--I emphasize "necessarily," because rewrites are not all the same. If one gets lucky in revisiting a draft they have completed they may find that

1. They do not have to do very much rewriting. Most of what may have seemed wonderful during that first writing process may actually be wonderful, and finding that out can make a "rewriting" process feel very good indeed. (It may, in fact, be that rather than rewriting they have actually just done something much lighter and simpler--their supposed rewriting really more like an easy copyedit.)

and/or

2. The rewriting they must do is intuitive and easy. They look at something that may not work, and see the solution right away, everything just falling into place right away. When things go this way, again, they may actually feel good. Indeed, going about the work in this way they may experience that "flow state" people can get when the words flow out of them.

Of course, the rewriting experiences that make people hate rewriting are the ones where they do not "get lucky." Rather they find that what they wrote was not so wonderful at all--that maybe it will need a lot of work if the piece in question is even to just look decent. That in itself can be bruising to the ego, and callous or insulting as many tend to be about it, sniveling about a writer being "oversensitive" and the like, this matters--precisely because of how this process can leave an experienced writer fearing that they cannot get through a simple text message without a dozen crippling mistakes, with all that entails for one's creativity and productivity.

Moreover, the work of rewriting is likely to not proceed in that intuitive, flow state-inducing way. Rather they find again and again that they must stop and ponder what they did, puzzling out what does not work and why--an experience likely to kill any slippage into that flow state as instead they find themselves self-conscious, unsure, confused, awkward. When they do puzzle things out they are likely to find that the work requires them not to merely cross out a word here or make a different word choice there, but actually rearrange material--and eliminate material--and create new material to take its place. It can be very hard emotionally to let go of what one has created, especially on those occasions when that bit was satisfactory, or even very good, something they are perhaps proud of, but which must be discarded because however good it was in itself it no longer fits in with the rest of what they are doing. It can also be very hard to create the new material that must replace what they forced themselves to cut out--the effort to produce it likely to be a matter not of creative flow but of straining, maybe straining painfully, to pile one word atop another to cover over some hole their rearrangements and excisions opened in the text--and maybe watch the pile collapse before they are done, so that they keep rewriting the same portion of their work again and again.

Doing even a very little of this can be exceedingly time-consuming in itself, while it often feels as if one has done much more of it than they really did, because, the time consumption apart, that work process is deliberate, stop-and-go, self-conscious, confused, awkward, forced, painful. (Certainly when applying Track Changes--as I always do during a rewrite--I find that undertaking the work I often felt like I did a lot more alteration than I really did, the actual portion of the text marked in the colors and formatting indicating deletion or addition smaller than I would have guessed just going by my subjective feeling.) Moreover, the writer often does not do "a very little of this," what they thought would be a small job turning into a big one as they find that altering this insignificant-seeming passage here, they have to alter all those others there in their turn; that, maybe, what looked like an alteration at the level of a paragraph or even a sentence will necessitate alterations all the way up to the level of the whole structure. And they may, in their dissatisfaction with what there was before, and their consideration of new possibilities, cross--be forced to cross--the frequently thin, sometimes almost invisible, line between "fixing" and "changing," the complications entailed in which Robert Ludlum summed up well in his introduction to a reprint edition of Trevayne when he explained exactly why he did not try to update what seemed to him a very timely book: "As anyone who has . . . remodeled a home will tell you, once you start tinkering, you may as well throw away the schematics. It becomes a different house." So they end up building the different house, but in that much more arduous way--that stop-and-go, self-conscious, confused, awkward, forced, painful way imposed on them by doing it using so much of the material of the original house as against starting that different house from scratch, while possibly forsaking what might have been a perfectly good older design, because they tinkered in that way that a significant rewriting can make very, very hard to avoid.

As if all of this did not itself make it difficult for a writers to take emotional satisfaction in any results they achieve there is the fact that they have no guarantees that, for all their work, they are actually making their first draft any better than it previously was--and have plenty of reason to fear that they are doing the opposite. Just as work produced in that state of creative flow is likely to "feel" better than it actually is, work produced in that more arduous, deliberate, way is likely to feel worse than it actually is--the strain of the work making them expect that the material when looked at will feel strained to the reader, as the whole, rather than having a happy unity that it at least seemed to during a flowing writing process, is to them too obviously a Frankenstein's monster of stitched-together parts.

Moreover, especially if the rewriting is heavy, they know they will have to give it another look, which will lead to more rewriting. Indeed, they have likely come to anticipate from past experience that another round, maybe many rounds, of the same time-consuming, deliberate, stop-and-go, forced, painful, Frankenstein's monster-stitching process lie ahead of them. Especially if they are astute enough to space out those rounds of rewriting, because they know that they can only do a decent job with the next round if they look at it with a fresh pair of eyes requiring a long break from the material, they know that the unpleasant process of rewriting this particular work will remain part of their lives for quite some time to come, with no guarantees about when it will end, or even if it will end with any positive result. Many know what it is to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again--and in the end be forced to give up the work in hand in defeat, and have in the end the kind of "learning experience" that the moralizing tell us is edifying, but which everyone would really prefer to do without. And they know that all this can, and in the long run probably will, happen to them again, because they hoped they would never have to deal with the really grueling kind of rewrite ever again and were disappointed in that hope again.

Keep in mind, too, that through all this the writer likely has the normal human eagerness to be done with a job that felt as if it was done (and yes, even knowing intellectually that rewriting is part of writing the completion of that first draft still feels like a completion)--especially if their time is limited, and they must be concerned for their productivity, and there are other things, including other writing projects, they would like to get to (and who is not in that position?), with this perhaps weighing the more on those who (in contrast with a writer who has a deadline at which point they must simply turn in what they have, especially if it meets some minimum level of acceptability and someone else will take it from there) in the end answer only to themselves. After all, they have to decide when "Enough is enough"--another burden of responsibility that may not weigh so heavily when the rewrite is light work, but which weighs very heavily indeed when it is not, the more in as the way we are taught to think about these things give us very little guidance. (We are almost always enjoined to put "more effort" into what they are doing--and almost never advised about when it is time to leave well enough alone, when doing any more would damage something that is as good as it is likely to get, messing up what might have been quite a good enough house had they known when the right thing to do really was to "be a quitter.")

Only an idiot would trivialize, would brush off, what all of that means from the standpoint of the writing experience, and the writing life. And I think it worth saying that, contrary to what many of those who brush off expressions of distaste for rewriting would have us believe, that hating rewriting is not necessarily a sign of callowness or laziness. Often it is an indication of the complete opposite--because the person who hates rewriting takes it seriously enough to do the job right, and to have in the course of doing the job right have had some of those bad experiences; to have known the really grueling rewrites when "tinkering" turned into building a new house, or rewrote and rewrote and rewrote and just never got it right, and maybe even suffered in deeper ways for it. (Frankly, it seems to me that suffering too much in the course of rewriting can undermine the ability to write--make that critical function work in overdrive, suppressing that essential word-generation, while ceaselessly discouraging the would-be writer by reminding them that, yes, they are going to have to rewrite afterwards.) Indeed, it is probably the most conscientious, the most ambitious, the most perfectionist who suffer most from rewriting, and get to hate rewriting most. By contrast those who think rewriting is only a very slight thing are likely to not actually know much about rewriting, perhaps even to have dealt with it only in a very superficial, lazy, way while flattering themselves that they are the superiors of those who have expressed less than happy thoughts about the task.

Of course, for all that a writer who actually cares about what they are doing will suffer through the rewriting process as described here--but are entirely entitled to their feeling during that process rather than having it trivialized by the Internet Idiots. I would also add that they deserve better advice than said Idiots tend to offer them, and the search engines shove in their face should they mistake of seeking out some meaningful comment about it.

In keeping with what I said earlier of the glib "advice" so many give on such subjects I will not presume to offer the reader such "advice." But I do think that honestly appraising what rewriting involves, and why it can be so difficult and uncomfortable, is a better start to helping us all figure out how to cope with the problem, than the ceaseless repetition of banalities that so characterizes the small and mediocre mind, and which always seems so salutary to the respecter of conventional wisdom.

Thomas Frank Eats a Sandwich with Seymour Hersh

Recently Seymour Hersh interviewed Thomas Frank over lunch. During the meal Hersh and Frank said a good many things of interest, but I thought Frank particularly nicely summed up Bill Clinton's legacy, referring to him as "the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along," not least because he converted "the market-based reforms of Reaganism" (i.e. neoliberalism) from a subject of controversy to the "accepted consensus wisdom" as he "completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing--signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform," as he even "almost got Social Security partially privatized." Frank also noted that what Clinton did became a model for his counterparts abroad, with this including Tony Blair's "New Labour."

Interesting, too, was Frank's consideration of the consequences of his quarter century of writing on these matters "with little effect." In his view the reason the effect has been so slight is "because politics isn't book learning," but rather "a clash of grand forces . . . industry and labor . . . social movements . . . money," while admitting the pessimism of the view he allowed that "the only lessons that get learned these days are the ones that flatter the powerful players involved."

All too true--and anyone presuming to think about politics in any serious way forgets it at their peril.

What Will The Expendables 4 Make This Weekend?

Boxoffice Pro has put out its last projection for The Expendables 4's debut--anticipating a gross of $10-$15 million in the movie's first three days of North American release, which, of course, is in line with the weak gross they have predicted over the past month (a final take of under $40 million, maybe even under $25 million).

This seems all too predictable, and not just because this is a fourth installment in a never-better-than-second-string action series coming out almost a decade after the poorly received third installment at a time in which franchise films like these just keep crashing and burning (as so many bigger films from more robust franchises did this summer), though it is plenty for this film, or any other, to have against it. There is, too, the shaky foundation for the franchise. The Expendables, like pretty much everything else in Sylvester Stallone career these past two decades (Rocky VI, Creed I-III, Rambo IV and V, etc., etc.) has been about milking the public's nostalgia for his earlier film career, with the nostalgia for the '80s action film that the original The Expendables was all about now that much more remote in the past, that much fainter a draw. (I will say it once more--Top Gun: Maverick was the exception, not the rule, the beneficiary of breathless media cheer-leading amid a summer of very weak competition, as underlined by its failure to deliver much of a boost for Tom Cruise's subsequent Mission: Impossible film , and the way that even bigger '80s phenomenon, Indiana Jones, did this past summer.)

Indeed, The Expendables, which came out in 2010, is now so far behind us that, while sequels invariably trade on nostalgia for those films to which they are follow-ups, the movie is trading on outright nostalgia for yesteryear's nostalgia--nostalgia for back when people were enjoying '80s nostalgia. This seems to me symbolized by the casting of Megan Fox in the film. Megan Fox, basically, got her moment in the spotlight in the piece of '80s nostalgia that was The Transformers--and after many years of not being seen very much by very many people in actual films, here she is, appealing to our nostalgia for when she was participating in a piece of '80s nostalgia. It all feels rather anemic, such that I see no grounds to expect this movie to surprise us with a better-than-expected opening, better-than-expected legs--let alone the very-much-better-than-expected performance required to turn this $100 million movie into a money-maker for its backers.

What Spike Jonze's Her Got Very Wrong About Artificial Intelligence

I did not particularly care for Spike Jonze's film Her.

There were many reasons for this. MANY reasons. But the one I want to discuss right now is how little sense Theodore Twombly's whole employment situation made. He writes personal letters for other people--and seems to make a very good living from it.

It seemed to me to be only too obvious that such work was likely to be ill-paid given any plausible economics of such an industry (just how many writers was one supposed to produce in a day, at what cost?)--even before one considered the extreme ease with which it could be offshored (for instance, to India, with its large population of well-educated English speakers and far lower labor and other costs), an option that Twombly's employers could not be expected to overlook.

Indeed, it seemed that the work would have been taken out of the hands of even the worst-paid humans by a level of artificial intelligence far lower than what Twombly's operating system displays at even the beginning of the film, given the scene where "Samantha" at a stroke improves the letters Theodore is working on. Editing and rewriting Twombly's work quickly, efficiently, successfully is something one cannot do unless they already know how to write at least as well as Twombly--and, as Theodore's getting this capacity as part of an ordinary consumer purchase shows, his employers could probably have replaced him with an app doing the job much more efficiently and cheaply than he could quite some time before, and would probably have rushed to do so even had they for some inexplicable reason declined to offshore his job.

I find myself thinking about all this again because our recent experience of artificial intelligence is bearing out those expectations. Today the mere creator of a first draft is decreasingly in demand--those who did such work reduced to making corrections on drafts generated by a chatbot, precisely because this is the higher-level skill that has thus far eluded the AI we have for the time being (contrary to what Twombly benefited from in his work, and what most writers today would really want, instead of the ticket to the unemployment line they are getting).

Of course, Her was not really about the likely path of such technology's development (at least, prior to the Singularitarian note on which the story ends), nor the economic and labor implications of that development. The concerns of those who make "independent-ish" films such as this, and of the critics who claque so enthusiastically for movies like these, are more "personal."

The results, however, have me once more standing with Emile Zola and H.G. Wells and all the others who tried to drag literature out of the eighteenth century in saying that it is hard to do "the personal" well when not giving any thought whatsoever to the world the "person" being written about actually has to live in.

Is the Cyber-Utopian Delusion Finally Passing?

I remember all too well the foolish cyber-utopianism of the '90s, not least that aspect of it that held it to be some great leveler, with the weak on an equal footing with the powerful in cyberspace.

I do not think there was ever a time when I took it seriously--it smacked too much of the "market populism" that Thomas Frank so skillfully analyzed in the first of his quadrennially published big books for the broader public, One Market Under God.

Yet, like a great many ideas that are at best dubious to begin with, and repeatedly exposed for what they are--of which there have been many in this "information age," not least the idea of an information age itself--it not only endured but remained conventional wisdom. It has been helped in this by the fact that as PR for Big Tech it was just too good to let go, and that Big Media itself has been so bound up with Big Tech as to have essentially the same interests. (Consider how MSNBC, in line with its original ownership, stood for "MicroSoft-National-Broadacasting-Corporation," all as Apple and Amazon and Netflix are simultaneously colossi in both worlds.)

Still, the critiques did continue to appear, and as happens when analysts have had both more time and more data to examine, become more scientific in character. Yes, such analysts have found, the digital age did diminish the cost of disseminating information.

But getting the information you put out there in the cacophony of the media world is another thing. It requires more than just "putting it out there." It has to be put in front of people, relentlessly, a game that, just as before the Web, favors those with vast resources operating in a top-down fashion, with an audience able and willing to pass on the word; those who have at their command a big, well-funded machine able to count on the deference of affluent, leisured supporters with round-the-clock Internet access self-confident about expressing their opinions publicly (like the executive who has a desktop in front of them in their office as against the supervised manual worker, who may not even have broadband access at home), especially if, rather than trying to carry on a debate, they emphasize driving home a consistent, simple message (preferably one that fits into a meme).

And of course, the dynamics of search engine and social media algorithms would seem to amplify the effect--things that get more clicks put in front of more people and getting still more clicks and more exposure in a virtuous circle, as those who had a weaker launch get the opposite, spiraling downward into obscurity.

As Jen Schradie has observed, all this has favored the digital activism of the rich, powerful, established against those who are not.

The most talked-about significance of this has been political--the way that it seems to many that the Internet is dominated by the right, and in particular certain quadrants of it. Yet it also speaks to the difficulties of those in any situation where there is such an imbalance of resources--such that I again find myself thinking of the hype that surrounded self-publishing a decade ago, in which it was imagined that lone writers with nearly no resources could, at least to the point of making a living, compete against the ever-more concentrated and inaccessible traditional publishing industry. I suspect that at this point many have learned that the odds of that were never what the hype-mongerers made them out to be--and if anything have only got worse since.

The Box Office Projection for The Expendables 4: An Update

Last month Boxoffice Pro put out its projection for the likely domestic box office gross of The Expendables 4 (i.e. The Expend4bles)--a rather low $31-$45 million not for its opening night, or weekend, but its whole run. I remarked that,

unprepossessing as this already is I would not be shocked to see the projection fall in the weeks ahead (as has happened so many times this year with comparable films, like Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible).

In this week's update of the estimate (likely the last "long-range forecast" for the film) that is exactly what has happened. Where their projection had been a paltry $31-$45 million then, now their expectation is in the $24-$37.5 million range.

The result is that not only does the $200 million mark, which I already thought out of reach then, now seem even more remote, but it seems even more likely than before that the $100 million movie will fall short of a $100 million global gross.

Going by the rule of thumb that the reported production budget rarely equals more than 50 percent of the total outlay, (and often much less) given the price of advertising, distribution and interest, and the claims of "residuals and participations" on a film's income stream (likely not trivial in a Big Name-packed sequel like this one); and that the film needs to make at least 50 percent of that back at the box office (from 50 percent of the gross or less); the break-even requirement would be at the very least $200 million. Moreover, one can easily picture a situation where the bill was much higher. (A movie may cost three times its production budget, while the backers may get more like 40 percent of the gross, or even less, and needing the ticket sales to cover much more of the price tag given the upward bound there tends to be on home entertainment income--in which case the backers of a $100 million movie may need something more like $400 million+.)

Accordingly one can expect Expendables 4 to be a significant loss-maker. Still, in the year that saw The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 it will probably not make the Deadline list of the top five money-losers of the year.

Barbie and Oppenheimer Saved the Summer 2023 Box Office

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+).

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).

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.

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.