How Will the Film Business Do in 2024?

Last year the recovery of the box office over the course of 2022 in spite of the comparative fewness of the really big releases (the colossal success of the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels, the $400 million+ grosses of Dr. Strange 2 and Black Panther 2, etc.) convinced me that all the year was lacking was the usual slate of such releases. As 2023 was thoroughly packed with likely-looking blockbusters I predicted that the year would see box office grosses return to the pre-pandemic norm.

Of course, this has not been the case. Yes, people went to the theaters--but where the big franchise films had led the recovery through late 2021 and 2022, in 2023 the franchise films just kept flopping, to the point of reversing the trend toward recovery. Indeed, between the beginning of May and the middle of July the box office in 2023, adjusted for inflation, was running behind the box office in 2022, when there were far fewer films out--with only Barbie and Oppenheimer's overperforming spectacularly in late summer enabling any recovery to continue, and even then only slightly, 2023 still looking nearly certain to fall significantly short of the pre-pandemic years box office gross-wise (with just $7.4 billion collected as of this writing, as against the over $9 billion had collected by this point in 2019, or the $11 billion it equals in today's dollars, working out to its being a third down, and little reason evident so far to expect this to change).

In short, the recovery has stalled, while a more fine-grained picture is suggestive of an even more dire situation than that in the degree to which the box office is being carried by a few hits; and those few, ever-more critical hits become harder to predict as very expensive films that seemed like winners (the more expensive for pandemic-related delays and higher interest rates on the money borrowed to make them) keep failing.

The result is that I find myself less optimistic about what 2024 has in store--precisely because it offers pretty much the same kind of release slate that had seemed promising in 2023, packed with the once likely-looking blockbusters that, because they are big, action-oriented franchise films cashing in on very run-down old brand names and run-down old themes, no longer seem so likely as they did just a few years ago. Scheduled for this year are three more Marvel Cinematic Universe movies (Deadpool 3, Captain America 4, The Thunderbolts), and a good deal more Marvel besides (Kraven the Hunter, a third Venom movie, a Spider-Man spin-off in Madame Web), as well as more Ghostbusters, Mad Max and Alien, more Planet of the Apes, more Godzilla and Kong, more Bad Boys, more Transformers, more Karate Kid--and even, decades after the originals, sequels to Beetlejuice and Twister and Gladiator. We have, too, a live-action prequel to the live-action adaptation of The Lion King, as well as more Inside Out and Despicable Me and Kung Fu Panda. We have a John Wick spin-off, a Mean Girls remake, an A Quiet Place prequel. We have . . .

I think this suffices to make the point. If this year is anything like the last, these movies will, on the whole, perform much less well than their backers hoped, with one big film after another flopping outright as audiences decline to pay for movies they never asked for. (Again, Gladiator 2? Seriously?) Meanwhile the compounding of the disruptions of the pandemic by the disruption of the writers' and actors' strikes (the last, still ongoing) will mean the gap between revenue and outlay is that much higher, all as the "China market" can less and less be looked to for salvation in the event of failure at home. For all that there may be a Barbie or an Oppenheimer in there that will provide relief to the studios' finances, but, even allowing that such successes are by their nature difficult to foresee, nothing here looks to me likely. (The best I can come up with is Joker 2, though even that one looks like it can misfire horribly--becoming New York, New York to the first Joker's Taxi Driver.)

The result is that 2024 is shaping up to be another bad year for an already horribly battered Hollywood. To some extent it was not wholly avoidable. Even were Hollywood's executives to have fully rethought this year how they invest their studios' money the release slate would not have changed--it typically being two years or more between the "green-lighting" of a movie and its hitting theaters, with things tending to run more slowly in the wake of the pandemic and its associated confusions, so that 2024 necessarily reflects the premises and choices of 2022, 2021 and even earlier. Still, if the remarks of Robert Iger and David Zaslav are anything to go by, I would not be overly bullish on the prospect of Hollywood changing its practice anytime soon.

Considering the Pew Research Center Report on Americans' Interest in Sports: The Economic Divide

The Pew Research Center put out a report last week that discussed its finding that "Most Americans Don't Closely Follow Professional or College Sports."

I was not very surprised by the "big finding" highlighted by the item's title, or the observations that sports fans tend to be more often male than female, and older than younger. I was more surprised by the finding regarding sports and affluence--that people with higher incomes are more likely to follow sports than people with lower incomes--though perhaps I should not have been. After all, age and maleness both correlate with higher incomes.

Still, I think there is more to it than that.

Consider who is more likely to be into sports. Is it likely to be those who just watch them on TV, or those who attend events in person--which means paying the price of a ticket? Those who just watch sports, or those who play a sport--as with the golfer or tennis player? And who is more likely to be into college sports specifically? Those who have never bveen to college, or those who are alumni of colleges, especially big-name colleges with major athletic programs who have found it worthwhile to retain links to their alma maters? It seems to me that the person who goes to events in person, who plays sports, who has the college connection, is more likely to be a sports fan--and the disposable income and time required to go to games or play sports in adulthood, the kind of background and income that tends to go with having attended a well-known college, correlates with more rather than less affluence.

Thus does it go with the sociality to which all this points. People go to sporting events together, with the experience about enjoying something with others as much as the intrinsic entertainment value of watching the sport itself. People are probably more likely to follow sports if other people they know and interact with (or want to) also follow sports--whether for personal reasons, or business, which is one reason why they stick close to their alma maters (and vice-versa).

All this makes it worth remembering that much as pop culture flogs the image of the rich isolated by their wealth, leaving them worse off than less affluent people who "at least have each other," the reality is that social isolation is probably more a problem of the poor than the rich, making this factor more rather than less significant. Indeed, it may even be that people being habituated to solitary entertainment, especially the kind where people are supposed to be absorbed in the entertainment (like video games, like film and TV intended to be "intense" experiences as is today more the case in the past) may leave them less able to enjoy the kind of entertainment one takes in the attitude of "someone who smokes and watches" as Bertolt Brecht once put it--such as sporting events happen to be--and which seems more likely to be characteristic of the kid who played video games than the kid whose father took them to such events growing up, in which that issue of affluence factors yet again (given whose parents had the chance to take them to games growing up, and send them to that college with the famous team).

The result is that here, as in so much else of life, class matters--and the conventional wisdom (per usual these days) gets the reality all wrong.

Mission: Impossible 8's Delay and What it Means for the Franchise

It was reported this week that Mission: Impossible 8 has been bumped a whole year, from the summer of 2024 to the summer of 2025 due to the interruption of production by the recent strikes.

This is, of course, bad news for the franchise. The interruption and delay, after all, will doubtless raise the doubtless already colossal expenditure on the movie higher still, while making still more unwise the gamble on the movie--not just shooting it before 7 was even out, but making of the two movies a "two-part event." Hollywood has not been unknown to win, and even win big, with such strokes--as with Avengers 3 and 4. However, that was a matter of an unprecedentedly popular franchise at the absolute peak of its success playing this game. The same cannot be said of Mission: Impossible, which is far past its turn-of-the-century peak, with the last film a massive underperformer (instead of the near-billion-dollar hit many expected it failed to break $600 million), and indeed a series low in real terms (worse than 2006's Mission: Impossible III, when the coprophages of the entertainment media went from unhingedly idolizing Tom Cruise to the extreme opposite because he jumped on a couch). The result is that the audience's more usual, annoyed, reaction to getting "one film for the price of two" was already more likely to come into play--such as was seen with the last two Hunger Games films, and the last film taking in $100 million less than its predecessor. In the case of Mission: Impossible 8 this is likely to be exacerbated by an extra year's delay, which especially in these times seems more likely to make audiences lose interest, or even forget, than make them hunger for more.

Mission: Impossible 8 merely matching what Mission: Impossible 7 grossed at the box office would probably have been disappointing enough given its prior budgeting. With its likely increased cost, and the likelihood of the movie making even less than Mission: Impossible 7 did, the gap between outlay and revenue would be worse--a perhaps $300 million+ film grossing less than $500 million at the global box office, translating to another hole in the books that its studio does not need, all as worse still is not out of the question with so many franchises seeing not just erosion, but Flash-like collapse as Hollywood's royalty, endlessly flattered by their courtiers and claqueurs in the entertainment press and elsewhere, keep feeding the public sequels for which it never asked--and for which it refuses to pay.

Considering the Pew Research Center Report on Americans' Interest in Sports: The Generational Divide

Not long ago I had occasion to think about how athletes seemed to have a higher profile in the media world just a couple of decades back, so that even people who did not follow their sport often knew something about them.

There seemed no great mystery there. Pop culture was a smaller territory then than now, and perhaps especially important the offerings of television more limited, so that sports had less competition for eyeballs, and was that much bigger a part of the culture generally, so that even the inattentive noticed.

There was also a significant amount of "sports entertainment" that got attention from people who did not ordinarily care to follow sports, because of its gimmicks or other attractions--like the old American Gladiators show, or the WWE (especially in the turn-of-the-century "Attitude Era"), providing plenty of visibility to a good many athletes, while there were still such things as fitness celebrity-packed workout shows on ESPN in the morning. And there was the way in which all this was leveraged, with the WWE, for example, pursuing tie-ins and cross-overs, getting their stars guest spots wherever they could, so that watching Star Trek: Voyager on UPN you saw Seven of Nine fighting The Rock for some reason--and very unusually for that character, losing, because there is no way they are going to put The Rock out there just to get beat up.

Sometimes this led to a second career, with The Rock, and John Cena, certainly, becoming as close to film stars as anyone gets to be in the twenty-first century. But all of that would seem to have fallen by the wayside (Gina Carano perhaps the last such success story, though alas her career is in a period of downturn). Effect as well as cause of those changes in media, it all probably plays its part in the generation gap existing between older enthusiasts and the less interested young the Pew Research Center would seem to have reconfirmed this month.

Boxoffice Pro Revises its Numbers for Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels) Downward (Again)

Whatever one makes of The Flash as a film it was in commercial terms the worst flop of the summer--a $300 million movie that finished its worldwide theatrical run with a mere $271 million grossed. Constituting outright collapse for the DCEU franchise of which it is a part, the flopping of franchise film after franchise film over the summer (Fast and Furious, Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible) had me wondering if Captain Marvel 2 (The Marvels) might not similarly be a moment of Flash-like collapse for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Two weeks ago Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast including the film confirmed the impression, with an estimate of $121-$189 million for the film's domestic run, the low end of the range only marginally better than what The Flash picked up in North America ($108 million).

Still, bad as that was I remembered all too well how many of the year's underperformers saw their prospects decay between that first long-range forecast and their opening weekend--and while last week's forecast edged downward only marginally (2 percent they said) this week's forecast showed a significant dip. The publication's projection for the film's run is now $109 million-$169 million, a significant drop from the already low figure of two weeks before that leaves the low end of the range almost exactly at what The Flash managed, and we still have two weeks to go, during which a lot could change--possibly for the better, but perhaps also for the worse. At that same point, two weeks from release, Boxoffice Pro was projecting a $208-$322 million gross for The Flash, meaning that they expected the movie would make at worst twice and perhaps three times what it actually ended up making.

Were The Marvels to underperform similarly relative to its own two-weeks-before-release projection the movie would make $55-60 million, not on opening weekend, but over its entire run, ending up with half what The Flash grossed domestically--without necessarily doing better abroad. In that case my earlier projection of $250-$500 million, which had already been revised downward from an earlier figure that was not all that great, would seem overoptimistic.

This is a really extreme scenario, of course. But the point is that this is how badly that movie crashed and burned this year, such that it cannot be wholly ruled out.

Still, at the other end of the spectrum of possibility there is the possibility of people who see the film actually liking it. After all, hits these days seem to be less front-loaded than they used to be--in part because the usual claquing may be less effective (it sure fell flat with The Flash), but perhaps also because people are less intent on heading out on opening weekend, with other people actually finding a film worthwhile getting them out there on those later weekends as we have seen time and again this year.

Consider what that might mean for the current anticipation of a $45-$67 million opening weekend (especially as just as things could get much worse, there is no guarantee that they will). Should the film manage to, in spite of this weak debut, end up displaying the kind of staying power that Elemental did--more than quintupling its gross--the film would make $235-$350 million domestically. If the international markets respond similarly (within a situation where the final take adheres to the 38/62 domestic/international split seen with the original Captain Marvel) this would work out to a gross in the vicinity of $930 million at the high end of the range, a near-billion dollar hit exceeding anything the MCU has achieved since Dr. Strange 2 (and every really comparable movie since Avatar 2), while even at the low end of the range the movie would make $600 million+, at least bringing the movie within striking distance of breaking even.

For my part I can picture the performance shifting downward more easily than I can picture it moving upward--but I also think that some caution is increasingly in order about assuming too much on the basis of an opening weekend. Between the two I will, for now, stick with my prior projection of $250-$500 million for the worldwide gross, if with the low end looking that much more likely after this latest report.

Are Box Office Hits Becoming Less Front-Loaded? (The Evidence of 2022 and 2023)

Last year the success of Top Gun 2 was received as significant confirmation of the recovery of the box office--but also something more.

Some rushed to argue that the movie's success suggested the old-fashioned star-powered vehicle was back.

If so, there has been little evidence for this position this year--with even Tom Cruise's own draw as a star far from affirmed by the way Mission: Impossible 7 flopped.

Such observers would have done better to pay attention to how Top Gun 2 became such a big money-maker. Yes, a big crowd came out opening weekend--but what is more important it drew surprisingly big crowds on the second weekend, and the third, and the fourth, week after week after week, so that even in its ninth weekend in play (by which time many films have virtually vanished from the theaters) the movie still brought in over $10 million. It did not slip from the "top five" of the weekend until week 11, and even after that point managed to bring in another $55 million on top of its already considerable pile. The result was that Top Gun 2 more than quintupled its very respectable first three day gross of $127 million (with a total of $719 million collected domestically).

Few films have done so well. However, it is notable that Avatar: The Way of Water likewise quintupled its opening weekend gross. Meanwhile this year Barbie, Oppenheimer and The Super Mario Bros. Movie each quadrupled their hefty opening weekend gross, while if not a hit on the same scale Elemental more than quintupled its own opening gross.

This is quite a contrast with how movies like Avengers: Endgame, even as their grosses soared to new heights, tended to make forty percent of their money in their first three days of release--and it may well be that we are starting to see a pattern emerge here, the more in as so much else is changing.

Consider the films that have done well in 2023. The kind of movies that were conventionally front-loaded--big franchise sequels--have tended to do less well, as more idiosyncratic movies became successes. Their doing less well would by itself seem to suffice to make movies less front-loaded generally. Yet one can picture other factors at work here, the more in as they can seem related to that weaker response to new releases in big franchises--like audiences being less susceptible to "I've got to see it opening weekend!"-type hype; their, perhaps, being more likely to come out if they heard good things from actual people rather than just the claqueurs, so that perhaps the first weekend is not so strong, but the dip from the first to the second weekend is not so severe as might have been expected, because that word of mouth brought in people who would not otherwise have showed at all--with franchise films providing further confirmation of this by seeming to follow the same trajectory when they do well. There was no second-weekend succor for, for example, The Flash--but Guardians of the Galaxy 3 may be such a case. The movie's opening was generally regarded as disappointing, perhaps even to suggest a film underperforming to the same degree as Ant-Man 3--but industry-watchers were heartened by the second weekend response. This did not make the film as leggy as Elemental, but the sequel proved leggier than its initially better-received predecessor (where Guardians of the Galaxy 2 did not quite make 2.7 times its opening weekend gross, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 tripled that gross), enabling it to go a rather longer way to matching its gross than would otherwise have been possible for it.

The result is that box office-watchers might do better to show a little more caution in regard to using opening weekend response as a basis for their guesses about a film's overall run--the more in as the hits carrying the film industry these days are less likely to be the same kinds of draw on which it relied before.

Bond 26: Injecting a Little Reality into the Conversation

As Christopher Marc just remarked over at The Playlist, while "British tabloids would like us to believe that 'Bond 26' is just around the corner" (citing their endless rumor-mongering), Barbara Broccoli, speaking to the Guardian to promote Amazon Prime Video's reality show "007: Road to a Million," acknowledged that "When we get going on a Bond movie it takes our full attention for three or four years so that’s our focus."

In the wake of the remark--as an actual public statement from someone in the know, much more meaningful than what the entertainment press has generally exploited for the purpose of keeping up chatter about the franchise--some have considered the implication that it will be that length of time from now before a Bond film is ready for audiences. In other words, rather than 2025, one might do better to think 2027--or even 2028--or perhaps later than that.

Having spent a long time looking at the difficulties involved in keeping the Bond franchise going--and the upheaval in the film market today--even 2027 seems so far away as to represent possibly a different cinematic scene altogether from the one we know.

What Does Captain Marvel 2's Short Running Time Suggest About the Film?

It is at this point a common observation that movies have been getting longer and longer over the years. Discussing the trend I have tended to think of it as a matter of the studios having a harder time getting people to the theater and responding by trying to make their movie seem like an event somehow, and cramming in more spectacle, both of which conduce to those longer movies. Still, however one explains it the fact of those longer running times remains, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) no exception to the trend. Where the MCU's Phase One films averaged 124 minutes, the Phase Four films averaged 139 minutes--a fifteen minute expansion over the course of the decade between them (when, by the standard of 1985, even the Phase One movies were long for action films).

The reports indicating that Captain Marvel 2 will run a mere 105 minutes--versus the 139 minute norm for Phase Four of the MCU, the 133 minute norm for the saga overall, and even the 123 minute length of the first Captain Marvel, can thus seem a bit of a surprise. My guess is that this partly reflects the movie's tighter focus (the really long movies, like the Avengers films or The Eternals, tended to deal with bigger groups of superheroes), and lighter, more humorous tone, which brevity better befits (Ant-Man movies tending to be briefer than, for instance, Black Panther movies).

Still, that a movie that is a very big-budgeted superhero sequel is so much shorter than its predecessor may suggest something else going on, especially in light of the word about reshoots and delays--that dissatisfaction with what was filmed led to some brutal cuts, and a much shorter film than was originally intended. For an extreme case of the kind of thing I have in mind, consider that other superhero film, 2010's Jonah Hex, which clocked in at a mere 81 minutes. (Worldwide gross--$11 million, while so far as I know this one did not redeem itself in home entertainment.)

Of course, it will not be much more than two weeks before the audience gets to see the film for itself (while for what it is worth even the most pessimistic assessment still anticipates the movie doing a lot better than Jonah Hex gross-wise).

Just How Long Have the Running Times of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Films Actually Been?

The reports of Captain Marvel 2 as the shortest film the Marvel Cinematic Universe had to date sent me checking the figures on that. Just checking the numbers at Box Office Mojo it appeared that the 32 prior Marvel Cinematic Universe films ranged in running time from 112 minutes (for 2008's The Incredible Hulk and 2013's Thor 2) to 181 minutes (for 2019's Avengers: Endgame). The average seems to have been 133 minutes for the whole sequence from the original 2008 Iron Man to Guardians of the Galaxy 3, though it should be noted that the movies have trended toward longer running times--with the Phase One average 124 minutes, the Phase Two average 126 minutes, the Phase Three average 136 minutes and the Phase Four average 139 minutes, working out to a 15 minute growth from Phase One to Phase Four.

Still, even allowing for the overall trend toward longer movies there are distinct patterns to the differences in length across phases. Those movies about a larger grouping, as with the four Avengers films (ranging from 141 to 181 minutes), Captain America: Civil War (143 minutes) or The Eternals (156 minutes), tend to be rather longer than those centered on a single character, and especially those introducing a new character, which tend to clock in at the low end of the range (115-125 minutes or so). The Phase Four-released Captain Marvel was no exception to the pattern, coming as it did to just 123 minutes.

One also sees a tendency to brevity in the lighter, more comedy-oriented films. Certainly the Ant-Man films tended to run shorter than the average (averaging about two hours versus the 133 minute norm for the saga), with this also going for the notoriously silly Thor 4 (which clocked in at just 118 minutes).

As The Marvels has a tighter focus and lighter tone it seems natural for it to tend toward a shorter running time, to run for a little under two hours rather than a lumbering two-and-a-half. However, it is still something of a surprise to see a Phase Five sequel clock in at 18 minutes shorter than the original Captain Marvel, and about a quarter shorter than the usual Phase Four running time.

Of "Barbenheimer," Spider-Man and Elemental

During the summer of 2023 we have seen those movies that looked like "sure things" (Indiana Jones, Mission: Impossible, superheroes) disappoint badly--but we have also seen success where it might have been least expected. The most conspicuous case was, of course, "Barbenheimer"--how Barbie and Oppenheimer both overperformed so massively that they could be credited with saving the summer box office from the ignominy of an even poorer performance than was seen in 2022. However, we should consider, too, those other, less conventional films that did relatively well. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was, for Hollywood, a rare animated hit outside the family comedy or musical comedy genres--doubling the domestic gross of the first film as, also bettering its overseas gross, it approached a worldwide box office take of $700 million (while in North America outdoing every live-action superhero film so far this year), validating a relatively bold choice of project.

If in a more qualified way, Elemental may also be credited as a chancier film that ended up doing better than expected as safer films failed all around it--though of course how industry-watchers, and the industry, will respond to this remains to be seen.

The Decision to Go With a Theatrical Release for Blue Beetle, in Hindsight

Amid the collapse of the delusions about the profitability of streaming Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) found itself shifting course dramatically with two DC Comics-based superhero films it had originally intended to release to its MAX service, Batgirl and Blue Beetle. On the grounds that it was too costly to make economic sense anymore as a streaming project, and too "small" for theatrical release, the company's bosses decided to simply bury Batgirl, while "upgrading" Blue Beetle to a theatrical release with a bigger production budget and the associated backing. As it happened the movie seems to have got a decent reception from critics--and the few who saw it (such that it has a 92 percent Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes). However, the latter were not very numerous, with the movie's worldwide gross now standing below the $130 million mark.

Given what has been heard of the film's budget ($100 million+), what might be expected of the fuller expenditure (at least as much to distribute and promote it, and other claims on the revenue stream), between theatrical rentals and what the movie might make after its theatrical run from home entertainment, etc. (perhaps not doing more than matching that share of the ticket sales of $60 million or so), the backers could be out tens of millions.

As losses go this can seem trivial next to the hundreds of millions in losses the WBD may have suffered with The Flash. Still, it does raise the question of whether the company has done better putting the film out in theaters than simply finishing the movie on a lower budget and putting it out on streaming per the original plan.

Any thoughts on that, readers?

Elemental Goes From Flop to Hit

By the time the tracking-based estimates for Elemental began to circulate last May a note of pessimism about such films was penetrating through the noise of the usual claquing, especially about the productions of that studio that just a few years ago had looked as if it could do no very great wrong, Disney--the more in as Ant-Man 3 had disappointed, and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 had just opened to underwhelming numbers. The way the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid opened also did not help--and nor did the recent record of Disney animation (Disney having the prior year seen two big-budgeted animated movies, one of them from Pixar, make Deadline's list of the year's top five money-losers).

When Elemental arrived it did not defy the low expectations held for it, opening to just under $30 million. Still, the movie turned out to have Top Gun-like legs, more than quintupling its domestic take, while doing very well overseas, pulling in almost 69 percent of its box office gross from the international markets. The result is that where, more optimistic than most, I think (partly on the grounds that "concept-heavy" movies of this kind often find a warmer reception internationally than domestically), I suggested a likely range of $250-$450 million for the worldwide gross, and hewed toward the middle of that range more than the top, the movie overtopped that upper bound to pull in just a little less than a half billion dollars.

Admittedly this is not a prepossessing number for a Disney animated film by pre-pandemic standards (let alone coming out of the celebrated Pixar)--but we are told that it assures the film's profitability (at least, by the time that post-theatrical revenues like home entertainment, where Disney does well, are added in). The result is that, with the bar admittedly not very high, this one can be counted as a much-needed win for the studio.

How Much Will The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes Gross at the Box Office?

Up until now I have not given the Hunger Games prequel, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, much thought. It simply seemed to me that there was just not much demand for the movie (certainly nothing to inspire confidence in grosses on par with those of the preceding four films).

After all, the Hunger Games saga did not seem to cry out for continuation--let alone a prequel. This seemed to me all the more the case because of the way the saga, in print and on screen, ended on a disappointing note for many (the fourth film was the lowest-grossing of the lot by a significant margin, its gross a third or so down at the North American box office from the second film's); because the young adult dystopian action-adventure fad was already waning at that point, and now seems far behind us; because in book form the prequel had robust sales but does not seem to have had the phenomenal sales the original trilogy managed, testifying to the decline of interest; and because of the kind of success the original Hunger Games was, and the way the prequel relates to that.

Reading that original Hunger Games trilogy (I did discuss this in Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry) it seemed to me that Suzanne Collins succeeded with readers by interesting them in the personal drama of Katniss Everdeen--rather than with striking ideas, or a particularly compelling world, on which levels the book seemed to be weaker, while also being less successful with readers. (Considering the weaker response to the third book and the final two films it seemed to me significant that by this point the story increasingly emphasized "the bigger picture," the high politics, the harder sci-fi elements, which were both less well–conceived and presented than the personal story of the earlier books, and a tougher pitch to the general audience than a personal drama.) And this prequel is set way before Katniss Everdeen came along--a prequel relying ultimately on the interest of the background that seemed a weak foundation, with all that implies for a blockbuster-sized audience buying tickets to this one.

The result is that while I did not bother making estimates, Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast regarding the film came to me as no surprise--their prediction that the movie will pull in $90-$142 million, not on its opening weekend, but its entire North America run. In other words, even at the high end of the range the movie can be expected to pull in fewer dollars over that whole run than the first Hunger Games managed in its opening weekend more than a decade ago (when in March 2012 it grossed $153 million). Adjusted for inflation the projection for the prequel actually falls short of what the first Hunger Games movie made in its first two days ($118 million, or $158 million in September 2023 dollars). It is also scarcely two-fifths of the real terms gross of the lowest-earning of the movies (the fourth, Mockingjay--Part Two, whose $281 million in 2015 equals $365 million in September 2023 dollars).

Of course, one might wonder if the international market will come to the movie's rescue. As it happens the domestic/international split varies from 59/41 to 43/57 in the case of the four films released between 2012 and 2015. Let us now derive from these proportions multipliers for the North American gross as a way of calculating the worldwide gross--1.7 at the low end, 2.3 at the high end. Multiplying $90 million by 1.7 gets us $153 million. Multiplying $142 million by 2.3 gets us $327 million. Rounding for the nearest $50 million this gives us a range of $150 million-$350 million, versus the $850 million that the fourth film made globally in today's terms (or the $1.14 billion the second film, Catching Fire, made).

There is no way to read this as anything but a collapse in the global as well as the domestic gross, even at the high end, never mind the low--enough so that while I have yet to see a budget declared for the film from a source I feel that I can rely on, in light of the prior films' budgets (circa $80 million for the first, $160 million for the fourth, and thus $100-$200 million+ in today's terms) it seems safe to assume this production was not cheaper. Even at the bottom end of the range (a movie budgeted like the first Hunger Games, at least when the net is considered, with post-production costs merely comparable) for the movie to have much chance of breaking even with the help of its post-theatrical earnings it would need to make much more than $200 million, well above the bottom end of the range.* For a movie budgeted like the fourth film it would probably need even more than the $350 million comprising the high end of the range here. The result is that I can picture this production, which seemed to me ill-conceived from the start, easily being another addition to the year's already long list of big-budget money-losers.

* The premise of this estimate is that a $100 million film would, given the final bill being at least twice the production budget, come to $200 million+; and that films at this level tend to make well over 50 percent of their total gross from theatrical ticket sales; suggesting $120 million+ in rentals, and thus $250 million in ticket sales, as a necessity. With the film plausibly running a multiple of that in regard to expenses (a $200 million+ production, as much or even more for associated expenses like marketing and distribution for a total not implausibly in the vicinity of a half billion), that much more in the way of ticket sales is needed (especially as home entertainment, streaming, etc. revenues tend to have a lower ceiling than ticket sales).

Captain Marvel 2's Chances in Theaters: An Update

Some time ago I suggested that just as the DCEU suffered a collapse at the box office with The Flash, Captain Marvel 2 could be the same kind of disaster for Marvel. Last week's tracking-based estimates from Boxoffice Pro seemed to affirm that, with Flash-like numbers (an opening in the $50-$75 million range, as a movie that might have been expected to take in $700 million pulled in, at the low end of their projection, $121 million--as against The Flash's $108 million).

Of course, there was at the time still a month to go and I wondered if the numbers might not shift significantly. We had seen the estimates for Barbie and Oppenheimer, for example, rise greatly in the month before the release of both those films--while in release both movies considerably overtopped the expectations held for them on the very eve of their openings. However, other films have seen the expectations for their ticket sales plummet in those same weeks--as was the case with, for example, The Flash and Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible 7. And to be frank Captain Marvel 2 looks more like these as a big-budget action-adventure franchise film of the kind that has run into so much trouble lately. The result is that I have had my eye on the week-to-week fluctuations.

As it happens, there was not much movement since last week--a 2 percent drop one could dismiss as a "rounding error." Still, it was not the upward movement, let alone the significant upward movement, those hoping the film will be a hit must want to see--who will have to find consolation in there still being almost three weeks to go, and the fact that after that the speculation ends and the moviegoers themselves will make the only commercial judgment on the film that counts in the end.

The Expendables 4: Where it Stands Now

Ordinarily I go by Box Office Mojo when citing box office grosses, but given the evident incompleteness of their figures in regard to The Expendables 4 (China is left out altogether) it was worthwhile to go elsewhere. Offering an alternative, apparently more complete, figure, is The Numbers, which as of yesterday reported the film's worldwide gross, at last count, as a little under $49 million.

$49 million.

The movie will probably edge past the $50 million mark before it departs theaters entirely, but not by much, which would work out to perhaps $25 million in rentals for the movie's backers--as against the $100 million+ they spent on production, and the at least comparable figure that they probably spent on everything else (promotion, distribution, participations and residuals).

Theatrical flops do sometimes become hits in home entertainment--but there is a very big gap indeed between that $25 million and the $200 million+ laid out for the film, the kind of gap that few movies but blockbusters are able to cover.

The result is that in just about any year but this one the movie would be guaranteed a spot on Deadline's inevitable list of the top money-losers of the year--while even in the year of The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 this one still has a shot at that dubious distinction.