Is Joaquim Phoenix's Napoleon Really Just Arthur Fleck in Period Costume? (And Napoleon Just a Do-Over of Joker?)

Joaquim Phoenix's performance as Napoleon in the recent Ridley Scott biopic has got a good deal of attention for, among much else, Phoenix's constant mumbling of his dialogue.

Considering this I find myself recalling a criticism I made of Joker some time back: that the film's makers seemed unable to think of any figure like Arthur Fleck, a beaten-down working-class man, as possessing any impressive qualities, intellectually or in any other way--could not imagine that a beaten-down working-class man might well be a "genius," or have the seeds of genius in them--even though they also expected us to think of him as the man who (somehow) becomes the famous super-villain who challenges Batman over and over and over again.

That inability seemed to me awfully conventional and conformist, with all the class prejudice that goes with that.

And remembering that I now ask, did Ridley Scott (or whoever did his thinking for him here; the publicity I saw indicates history, reading books, etc. aren't "his thing") imagine Napoleon as Arthur Fleck? A sub-mediocre nonentity disdained by his social "betters" who, as a result of the combination of not being quite sane with a bunch of incredible coincidences, leads to his ending up the mad, bloody-handed central figure in an episode of anger among the lower orders that produces chaos and killing on a wide scale, in the process becoming a "super-villain" of history--a real-life Joker?

Given the film's dismissive attitude toward the significance of the French Revolution and all it produced (at least, insofar as those events may have meant anything in human life other than bloodshed and misery) this does not seem too implausible--or for that matter, original. Reading Tolstoy's War and Peace, for instance, Tolstoy blasts the reader in the face with his contempt for Napoleon (deriving from the prejudices Tolstoy held at the time as a Joseph de Maistre-reading right-wing romantic and conventionally patriotic Russian aristocrat ferociously arguing for the Counter-Enlightenment), to which end he deploys a deterministic, anti-Great Man view of history (with an inconsistency reflective of his fundamental anti-rationalism here). That alone suffices to provide ample precedent for that treatment of this particular figure--though I doubt that, even acknowledging the many imperfections of Tolstoy's most famous work, anyone will ever regard Scott's film as at all on its level, even if they happen to be capable of properly making the comparison.* (Alas, far more people lie about reading that book than actually read it--one reason, I think, why Thomas Butt's discussion of Napoleon, treating the film as a "deconstruction" of the Great Man theory of history, seems to me fulsome in the credit it accords it.)

* I suggest that those interested in Tolstoy's politics and general world-view at the time that he wrote War and Peace (which they might wonder about my characterization of as they differ importantly from those of the later Tolstoy more famous as humanitarian and political thinker) check out Isaiah Berlin's classic essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox."

What Will Deadpool 3 Make at the Box Office? (A Very Tentative Prediction for Entertainment Purposes Only)

The past year has been a more than usually chaotic one for film release schedules, given the disruption of Hollywood's first "double strike" (by both the actors and writers) since 1960, compelling the delay of work on a good many movie productions to the point of bumping their release dates from 2024 into 2025.

One result is that while this year will, as usual, have plenty of superhero stuff and even Marvel stuff (particularly Spider-Man-related stuff, like Madame Web, Venom 3, Kraven the Hunter, milking that most consistently successful franchise), there will only be one proper Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) release, Deadpool 3.

How well can we expect it to do?

For a start, we can look at how past Deadpool films have done.

The first Deadpool movie made $363 million domestically, and a total of $782 million worldwide, back in 2016--which works out to a $470 million hit at home, and a billion-dollar global gross when we adjust for December 2023 prices (a feat the more impressive because there was no Chinese release).

The second Deadpool movie made just a little less--$318 million domestically, $735 million globally, or in December 2023 prices, about $387 million domestically and just under $900 million globally.

Thinking in terms of the average of the two films we would get a gross of $430 million domestically, and around $950 million globally--sensational numbers. If we instead see the trend of decline suggested by the drop in gross from the first film to the second continue we can, anticipating a Deadpool 2-like drop from its predecessor, picture the movie making over $300 million+ domestically, and $800 million globally. This is less sensational, but still very, very good for a Deadpool movie--and indeed way better than what one can expect for a superhero movie, a Marvel movie, a franchise movie after the disastrous year of 2023.

That said, let us look at those expectations more closely. While the tendency toward franchise films in the superhero, spy-fi and associated genres crashing and burning has been broadly evident across Hollywood's output (the DCEU suffered, too, and so did Indiana Jones, and the Fast and Furious, and Mission: Impossible), to the point of making the kind of collapse that Solo represented for the Star Wars series now routine, let us focus in on the MCU specifically. Marvel's late Phase Four and early Phase Five films (from Thor 4 through Guardians of the Galaxy 3) showed 20 to 50 percent drops in their global grosses compared with the immediate predecessors in their series'. Already bad enough in itself, Captain Marvel 2 (aka The Marvels), which has pretty much finished its run with $200 million in the till (against the $1.1 billion the original picked up in 2019), saw an even worse 85 percent collapse (after adjustment for inflation).

A 20 to 50 percent collapse from Deadpool 2's gross would leave the movie with about $450-$700 million worldwide--which graded on the curve most now seem to be using would not be too bad (especially at the high end of the range). A Captain Marvel 2-like 85 percent collapse would leave it with just $150 million in the till, which would be a new low for the battered MCU.

For now these two figures--$150 million and $700 million--seem to me to represent the most extreme possibilities. I do not, at this point, see reason to think Deadpool 3 will suffer as badly as Captain Marvel 2 did. After all, even Aquaman 2, for all its troubles, is doing considerably better, showing that even now $200 million is not the ceiling for such films (Aquaman 2, flop that it may be, is on its way to grossing twice that), and Captain Marvel 2 had a very great deal working against it (production delays, an awkward tie-in with small-screen Marvel, rather weak early promotion, a sharp change in tone from the predecessor, etc.), more than Deadpool probably will.

At the same time I know no reason to think that Deadpool will manage to go very far in bucking the broader trend. The first movie, and even the second, seemed to command some real affection from fans, who may be more willing to give a new Deadpool movie a chance than other "usual" Marvel releases, but this sequel will still be hitting theaters six years after the last film (which itself, again, had shown some evidences of the fan base's erosion), in a time in which Marvel is looking very tarnished indeed and superhero fatigue is not so easily denied as the claqueurs would have us believe. The result is that, with the release still four months off and a lot possibly happening between now and then I find myself looking toward the middle of the range I have cited above--between the relatively slight Guardians of the Galaxy drop, and the extreme Captain Marvel drop. The result is that, for the time being, the safest guess seems to be that the movie's gross will be in the $400-$450 million range (while I would add that given the trend of things it is easier to see the movie doing worse than better).

Has Marvel Forgotten the Secret of the Superhero Film's Success?

It has long seemed to me that the reason for the consistent success of the superhero film relative to other forms of splashy sci-fi spectacle at the box office is the tendency of such movies to be accessible to broad audiences. This seems to me to be confirmed by the characters whose adventures have proven most salable over the decades--Spider-Man and Batman. In each case we have a hero who is a human being (rather than an alien, a god or something else of the kind with all the associated history) existing in contemporary New York or some derivative of it (Gotham counts) and having what are usually fairly grounded adventures (fighting local criminals rather than extra-terrestrial or inter-dimensional invaders).

Compared with a space opera requiring the viewer to process the cosmography, technology, politics, history of the people, or multiple species, of a galactic civilization, it asks very little of us in the way of cognition--which, even if hardcore fans of science fiction and fantasy love the intricate world-building and the rest, is best with the kind of mass audience to which one has to appeal to sell a billion dollars' worth of tickets. (Yes, every once in a while there is a Star Wars or an Avatar, but it is notable that in each of their ways they were, at least at the outset, conceptually simple films by the standard of that genre, while on the whole the superhero movies have for decades been far more consistent winners with audiences than movies like these.)

The early Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films certainly kept it simple, very simple (to the point of flatness in the view of more hardcore fans)--with this likely to its advantage. Iron Man, Thor, Captain America were far from being demanding movies--and the same even went for a movie in which they were all thrown together. Instead of it making for something hard to follow people said "Iron Man and Thor and Captain America all in the same movie? And the Hulk, too? Cool!"--after which 2012's The Avengers became a blockbuster on such a scale as to start the MCU on the path of making billion-dollar hits routine.

However, if the films did not get more complex, the interconnections among an increasingly sprawling collection of films, and then TV shows produced for the Disney Plus streaming service, did so. This did not have to be a problem--except that the big-ticket movies were getting made with their plots assuming the moviegoers had watched the streaming shows. In the process the simplicity that made the movies accessible, and enjoyable, for a wide audience fell by the wayside. Granted, the result did not make the same kind of demand as other more involved forms of science fiction, but all the same, there was that greater processing burden as the producers expected the general public to watch each and every little thing they made, and care about all of it, and relate it to what they were looking at. (Thus did it go with Dr. Strange 2. Thus did it go with the plan to launch Phase Five with a film from one of the weaker franchises in the group, Ant-Man 3. Thus did it go with The Marvels.)

In short, they expected the general audience to be willing to pay the same level of attention as the really hardcore audience. It was not a reasonable expectation--and while it has been far from the only problem the franchise has faced (a higher bar for what will get people to theaters post-COVID, the groaning of a franchise that was always more marketing success than a display of artistic genius under its own weight, the wearying of the audience for blockbusters like these generally and superhero films specifically), it is indicative of the franchise-runner's poor understanding of their own material, and consequent poor management of what had for so long been a spectacularly profitable franchise, now looking very vulnerable indeed.

The 2023 Box Office in Review

Back in 2023, looking at the prior year's track record with qualified successes such as Venom and No Time to Die, and the indisputable blockbuster that was Spider-Man: No Way Home; and the current year's Top Gun 2, Avatar 2 and Marvel films (Dr. Strange 2, Thor 4, Black Panther 2, which if suggestive of Marvel being past its peak still took in $1.2 billion domestically); it seemed to me that the box office was returning to its pre-pandemic norm, more or less--that people were for the most part going to the movies again in the same fashion as before, to see essentially the same films as before, to go by how the big franchise films led the way, and indeed claimed an even larger share of the box office gross than they had prior to the pandemic. Indeed, it seemed to me that if the real box office gross in 2022 was not much more than half the norm for the years 2015-2019 (about 54-55 percent of the figure) this was a matter of the release slate in 2022 being relatively thin, with 2023's being packed with blockbusters likely to take the box office the rest of the way back to the pre-pandemic average, or close to it.*

Alas, 2023 proved a big surprise that way. Yes, the recovery continued, but only to a very limited extent, the gross, adjusted for inflation, a little less than two-thirds of the 2015-2019 average; with this connected to the way that those big franchise films that had led the recovery through late 2021 and 2022 began to consistently disappoint.** Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was only a slight underperformer that will, in the end, be one of the year's bigger successes--but movies like The Flash, Indiana Jones 5, Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2 put in performances that, from the perspective of their franchises, were the equivalent of Solo: A Star Wars Story's crashing and burning back in the summer of 2018, while other films like Fast and Furious 10, Transformers 7 and Mission: Impossible 7 did not do much better than that (the last, a series low). Indeed, the box office ended up being carried not by the franchise films but by more idiosyncratic successes--The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the spring, and Barbie and Oppenheimer in the summer (and in its own way, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse too), while the absence of hits on that scale meant that the recovery slowed significantly in the fall. (Where for the first eight months of the year the 2023 box office was in real terms 20 percent higher than in the equivalent period in 2022 in the last four it was just 8 percent higher--and would have been worse for lack of such modest but helpful surprises as Five Nights at Freddy's and the record-breaking concert film Taylor Swift: The Era Tour.)

In short, Hollywood remains a very long way from its old grosses, while its method for ever getting there is very much in question now, given that the traditional would-be blockbusters are not bringing in people like they used to do in a manner not seen since the decline of the historical epic and the musical way back in the '60s, and at the same time smaller films are getting to be a tougher sell generally (the audience rejecting not just The Flash but Blue Beetle). Naturally, the road ahead in 2024--a year which offers a franchise blockbuster-heavy slate similar to 2023--does not promise much better, the more in as the pattern of franchise failure is more firmly established (recall that back in February 2023 even an Ant-Man 3 could pull in $200 million domestically, which seems like a real longshot now), and a good many important releases by the strikes of 2023 uncompensated by the bumping of some of 2023's movies into 2024 (so that this year Hollywood will have to do without the grosses of Marvel's Captain America 4 and The Thunderbolts, Mission: Impossible 8, the live-action Snow White adaptation and even Avatar 3). Additionally, admitting that such things are by their nature surprises, anything that has even a whiff of potential Barbie-like success about it (with the consequences of that already demonstrated by the weak grosses of these past four months) seems absent. The result is that I anticipate no great improvement in 2024 over 2023. Indeed, there might even be a fall in the gross from this year's level, as the offerings discussed here fail to tempt audiences back to the theaters to even the extent that they managed to do so last year.

Still, I see no turnaround in studio practice anytime soon, while I expect that the claqueurs of the entertainment press will for the most part grade everything on a curve as they encourage everyone to look on the bright side of things.

* A bit under $7.4 billion in 2022, adjusted for 2023 values the gross (I refer here to the "in calendar" gross as reported by Box Office Mojo, with whose numbers I am working here) was $7.6 billion--against the $14 billion average for 2015-2019 when one makes a similar adjustment for inflation.
** The gross in 2023 was $8.9 billion, about 64 percent of the $14 billion 2015-2019 average.

The September-December 2023 Period at the North American Box Office

Through 2023 we saw the box office, if still well short of its pre-pandemic norm, continue to recover--in the main on the basis of a handful of hits, but not the ones that might have been expected. The films that for decades have been the foundation of Hollywood's commercial viability--the big franchise films of the action and animated varieties, the superheroes and spy-fi and Disney projects--at best performed decently when graded on a curve (as with Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and even Elemental), and more often flopped again and again (The Flash, Indiana Jones 5) as more idiosyncratic films offered what salvation Hollywood's bottom line was to have, as with The Super Mario Bros. Movie in the spring, Barbie and Oppenheimer in the summer (and in its own way, the animated Spider-Man film, which has indeed ended up the highest-grossing superhero movie of 2023 in North America).

There were no hits on that scale in the last four months of the year (or for that matter, to compare with the prior year's hits, Black Panther 2 and Avatar 2). Still, Five Nights at Freddy's and the Taylor Swift concert film (Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour) both overperformed in a way that may be said to have extended the pattern, as what a few years ago looked like sure-fire hits in the sequels to Captain Marvel and Aquaman performed terribly. Indeed, The Marvels and the other less than enthusiastically received Thanksgiving releases (the Hunger Games prequel and Disney's Wish in particular) actually meant that ticket sales were lower in November 2023 than in November 2022 (when Black Panther 2 did, whatever else one may say about the film, manage to sell over $374 million worth of them before the month was out), but the four month period as a whole posted an 8 percent improvement on the prior year's films after inflation.*

To be perfectly honest I was surprised by the figure. Even if it indicates a significant slowing of the recovery (for the first two-thirds of the year the gain was more like 21 percent after inflation) it was still rather better than I would have expected given the lack of really big hits, and, again, its comparison with the patch that had Black Panther 2 and Avatar 2 (the two films alone grossing over $800 million before the year's end, more than the top six films of the last four months of 2023, none of which even came close to matching Avatar 2's earnings in just 2023).** Given the only limited boost of the few successes it seems to me to have been a reflection of the difference between 2022 and 2023--this year having a good many more big movies out, individually not making very much but those disappointing grosses together making it look as if things are better than they really are. After all, spending $200 million+ on a movie that barely grosses $200 million globally (as has been the case with The Marvels) is not a winning strategy--with the frequency with which this has happened through 2023, and its last four months, a reminder that the current situation is simply not sustainable, all as it shows little sign of changing for the better very soon.

* According to Box Office Mojo (the source of the raw box office data for this post) the last four months of 2022 saw the box office take in about $2.1 billion. The last four months of 2023 saw it take in $2.33 billion--about 11 percent more. Adjusting for inflation (3.5 percent a whole for the year according to a preliminary estimate, more or less consistent with the estimates we have for September-November), this comes to more like $2.26 billion, and a gain of about 8 percent. Where Black Panther 2 is specifically concerned it is worth noting that its November ticket sales equaled 60 percent of all ticket sales for that month.
** The first eight months of 2022 saw the box office take in $5.27 billion; the first eight months of 2023 some $6.57 billion. Adjusting for inflation in the manner discussed above (3.5 percent) gives us $6.35 billion in 2022 dollars, a 21 percent improvement. Admittedly inflation fell over the year, from 6 to 3 percent year-on-year, but more meticulously making month-to-month comparisons based on the inflation data (January 2023 against January 2022, February 2023 against February 2022, etc.) does not change the picture much, reducing the value of the gross in the first eight months of 2023 to just $6.31 billion, and still working out to a 20 percent improvement. Where the specific films are concerned, Avatar 2 made $400 million, Black Panther 2 $436 million, whereas the Taylor Swift film made just under $180 million, the Hunger Games prequel $160 million, Freddy's $137 million, Wonka $133 million, Trolls 3 $96 million and The Equalizer 3 $92 million. As the list shows even the biggest hit, Taylor Swift's film, fell over $100 million short of the $280 million that Avatar 2 made in the early part of 2023, after pulling in the bulk of its money before New Year's Day.

Napoleon in the Context of Ridley Scott's Body of Work

A few months ago I asked here whether Ridley Scott's Napoleon might not, like Oppenheimer, surprise us by making a major hit of the unlikely material of a historical biography. I concluded that the chances of that were slight--and a month and a half after the film's release the issue appears settled, with Napoleon a weak box office performer, and no critical darling. (The movie's worldwide gross is just over $200 million--guaranteeing that the movie will have to do fairly well in home entertainment just to break even on its big budget--while with a critical score of 58 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and the precedent of the Golden Globes behind us, I would not expect to see the backers compensated for their financial disappointment with little statuettes.)

As it happens, this is not the first time this has happened to Scott, who having his career in an era in which period pieces are tough sells to audiences, has nevertheless made quite the habit of such pieces, and indeed of full-blown historical epics--and much more often than not failed with them commercially and critically, after which they tended to pass into obscurity. (Remember the quincentennial-of-Columbus'-first-voyage-marking 1492: The Conquest of Paradise? Kingdom of Heaven? Robin Hood? His do-over of the Biblical book of Exodus? Or even 2021's The Last Duel?)

Gladiator was Scott's only real "win" with the historical epic--an exception in the career of a director whose artistic standing rests mainly on his work on other genres--notably the renown he got for two of the classics of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom (Alien and Blade Runner while his credibility as a director able to at least deliver commercial success rests on later films in that genre (like the rather lousy Alien prequel Prometheus, and the adaptation of The Martian), and the crime genre (with high on the list of his more successful films here Black Rain, Thelma & Louise, Hannibal and the only marginally period '70s-set American Gangster and All the Money in the World), as along with a couple of war films with contemporary or at least very recent settings (G.I. Jane and Black Hawk Down).

Yet Scott kept going back to the historical genre (one reason why we have not only got Napoleon but will be getting a sequel to Gladiator that absolutely no one asked for), in spite of what Gladiator unintentionally demonstrated--and what even the fawning puff pieces for his new film affirm again and again in spite of themselves--that Scott simply has no real interest in history, let alone anything interesting to say about it. Gladiator pretty much offered a standard B-movie action plot--super-soldier who served his country faithfully and brilliantly is betrayed by an evil Establishment type, forcing him to get revenge, which he does (because "This time, it's personal!")--with this only looking different because of the novelty of the period trappings, and the extreme lavishness of the production, and the whiff of WWE about the proceedings, while good an action film as it was, from the standpoint of historical drama it was risible. And Napoleon, certainly to go by the remarks of Michael Roberts, George Marlowe and David Walsh, seems little better (while its extreme conventionality of perspective is rather more obvious).

So why does Scott keep coming back to the genre? Alas, Scott's answers to his interlocutors notoriously present the reader with more arrogance, flippancy, verbal abuse and "unprintable" vulgarity than they do insight (as, in a reminder that the entertainment press consists so largely of idiot suck-ups to the rich and famous who would be ashamed of themselves if they had a normal human capacity for shame, many of its members absolutely celebrate him for it). Left to guess as a result, my guess, for whatever it may be worth, is that Scott, who has always been more impressive on the level of spectacle than storytelling or ideas (indeed, it is visual style that people seem to remember most from even his most acclaimed work), simply likes presenting historical spectacle on the screen; likes managing these big productions with their vast casts and costuming and the rest that gives them their visual impact; likes, maybe, the thought of doing something we associate with the old-time Great Directors in Hollywood's Golden Age than the filmmakers of today.* And his standing in the film world is such that he gets a chance to do so every few years, in spite of the poor track record of the results at the box office.

* Where the limits of Scott at even his best are concerned I find it worth citing Kevin Martinez's review of the sequel to Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, in which he had occasion to remark what he saw as the earlier film's rarely remarked weaknesss. While calling the original "visually distinguished" he also found it "narratively cold, meandering and dull," specifically noting among its "most irritating aspects . . . its murky, chiaroscuro lighting . . . plodding pace . . . overall dreary, depressed atmosphere" (as these were, in his view unfortunately, carried over into the sequel) in a film that was "more of an accomplishment in production design than in cinema."

Soap Opera as a Distinct Form of Storytelling

People often use the term "soap opera" to refer to a kind of storytelling, but it seems to me they rarely spell out what they mean in a clear, useful, way.

In trying to do better it may help to consider the fundamentals of "good," dramatic, conventional storytelling in the Western tradition going back to Aristotle and since developed by people like Gustav Freytag.*

From such storytelling we expect a story to be a "completed action." We expect a unity of "time, space and action." The result is that we expect that of the cast of characters one will clearly be protagonist; we expect that there will be a clear, main line of plot development; we expect the details to all matter (in line with the principle of "Chekhov's gun") as we proceed from exposition to rising action, climax, falling action, denouement--and beginning, middle and end.

This does not wholly exhaust the standard, but it is what is most important in it for explaining how the soap opera differs from it, because it lacks all these qualities. Rather than that completeness and unity of structure with its requirement of some measure of tightness of construction it is apt to be rather loose--a "loose baggy monster" if it goes on for long. Rather than having a clear protagonist it is about a bunch of people of whom one is unlikely to be, or remain for long, clearly more central than the rest. There may be a starting point--but there will not necessarily be an end, and hence no middle, because what the narrative does is follow those many people not through one big action, but an assortment of different, perhaps unrelated and nonsynchronous actions likely to involve some and not others one after the other (with, it might be added, many actions making little to no difference in their lives because the show must go on, so to speak); while if there is an end it is more likely to be a matter of the writer ceasing to follow those characters' doings (even if he comes up with an end point for them that makes their ceasing to do so look logical) than because some trajectory starting at the beginning has satisfyingly run its course by this point.

In short, soap opera is fundamentally different from conventional, unified, plot pyramided beginning-middle-end-type storytelling--with, I want to stress, the accent properly on different (as I have no interest in getting into the issue of "worse," "as good," "better" here).

As the reader may have guessed from this, while we call this storytelling mode "soap opera" this is only because soap opera (a term originated with radio shows) tends to work like this, not because soap opera invented this kind of narrative, which we are apt to find plenty of in nineteenth century novels, for example. (The term "loose, baggy monster" comes from Henry James' characterization of War and Peace, which I think can fairly be called a soap opera in the sense in which I use the term here--the more in as Tolstoy intended it to be just part of a far larger saga.) Moreover, if the kind of programming we associate the soap opera with, the daytime television soap opera, is one in deep decline these days amid the general revolutionizing of media in the digital age, this kind of storytelling is still fairly widespread--the more in as the looseness of the format is such a convenience for executives handling messy productions, eager to keep writers on a tight leash, and ever happy to spread out and drag out their tales with extra seasons and sprawling shared universes for as long as they remain profitable. Episodic television generally works that way--and so do the many movie franchises that, as they become more prolific, function more like TV shows than movies or movie series'. Indeed, the Marvel Cinematic Universe can be taken as a soap opera--while in Disney's hands there seem to have been notions of turning the storytelling of the Star Wars saga into a soap opera.

As all this makes clear, people do enjoy soap opera--but sometimes taking this approach proves very ill-advised indeed.

* Even if you've never heard of Freytag you probably know Freytag's explanation of plot structure (popularly known as "Freytag's pyramid").

Is the Hunger Games Prequel Actually the Hit of the Season?

Initially considering the prospects of the Hunger Games prequel I was pessimistic--expecting this to be another case of a formerly hugely successful franchise flopping with its latest film in the way we have already seen a great many times in 2023. The low estimates for the film's gross did not change that--and nor did the lackluster opening weekend gross (the $44 million it made domestically in its first three days not only a far cry from what the films of the original saga made, but at the low end of the range anticipated for this one). Still, the film had better-than-expected holds two weekends in a row, leaving it with $121 million grossed after its first seventeen days. This is, of course, much less than what the original The Hunger Games made in just its opening weekend (about just three-fifths of what it made in its opening three days if we adjust the figures for inflation), but it beats anything released since Five Nights at Freddy's (and seems likely to overtake Freddy's too before all is said and done). Moreover, with Wish underperforming very badly, Napoleon falling fast and the outlook for Aquaman 2 grim, all as the chances of anything proving a Super Mario Bros Movie, an Oppenheimer, a Barbie this holiday season seem very slim indeed, such that amid this very weak competition the prequel might well be the Victor of this season's Games.*

* The Hunger Games made $152 million in its opening weekend in March 2012--which amounts to $204 million in October 2023 prices, going by the Consumer Price Index.

Is Box Office Failure Getting Boring?

When back in early March box office-watchers were realizing that, after its sensational opening weekend, Ant-Man 3's ticket sales were going flat--and certainly not kicking off the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phrase Five with the hoped-for triumph--there seemed to be real surprise. There was less surprise when Fast and Furious 10 and Transformers 6 performed poorly by the standard of their franchises, because expectations were lower, but it added to the normalization of the failure of the kinds of films that until very recently tended to be considered nearly sure-fire successes, as did the opening weekend of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (even if this was partially compensated for by good legs), the letdown that was the release of the live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, and, especially after its earlier insane hyping, the catastrophe that was the release of The Flash into theaters, as that very same weekend Elemental underperformed (its measure of redemption, too, coming a lot later and being limited in nature), and two weeks after that Indiana Jones 5, suffered (even considering the lowering of expectations after a poorly conceived worldwide premiere at Cannes) as bad a box office catastrophe as anything up to that point in the year. By their own more modest lights the superhero film Blue Beetle and The Expendables 4 franchise did just as badly.

By the time Captain Marvel 2 rolled around it seemed that no one was very hopeful for it--and the initial tracking-based estimates left less scope for disappointment, as you see rechecking the old figures. A month before release Boxoffice Pro told us that The Flash and Indiana Jones 5 would both finish well north of $200 million at worst, with the $350-$400 million range within reach, in just the domestic market. Alas, The Flash barely broke the $100 million barrier (pulling in less than it was supposed to make on just its opening weekend), while Indiana finished with under $175 million. By contrast Captain Marvel 2, expected to fall short of $200 million in even the best case scenario, and not outdo The Flash by much in the worst, had less way to fall--even as it did indeed fall lower than that ($100 million looking out of reach for the movie now). Meanwhile, as Disney's Wish proves a significant disappointment commercially (with the film's opening weekend again falling short of the low expectations for it, followed by a bad first-to-second weekend drop), and the prediction going that Aquaman 2 may not do much better than The Flash or The Marvels, it seems that the commentariat can scarcely work up a response. All that can be said has been said--even as the phenomenon continues, with every sign indicating that flops of this kind will continue in the same steady succession through 2024.

Of Robert Iger and "Unsupervised" Film Directors

Robert Iger, who seems scarcely able to open his mouth without disgracing himself, recently did so again with a silly statement about the lack of "supervision" on the set of The Marvels as the supposed cause of the film's failure.

It is another shabby instance of the old propaganda of the media business that the "creatives" are floopy-brained idiots who can produce nothing of value without the Practical People playing the strictest of strict parent to them--being, to use that awful cliché beloved by a certain kind of ideologue, the "adults in the room." (Consider, for instance, the lame script used to destroy the leading lights of the New Hollywood over and over again in succession. "Oh, they're a perfectionist!" "Oh, they can't stay within a budget!" "Oh, these artists and their visions!")

Just as before that propaganda has been dutifully, respectfully, passed on to the public by the entertainment press--because its members, "courtiers" by profession and indeed instinct, know that when they must choose from among those to whom they usually suck up, it is safest to go with the executives rather than the artistes. And the public believes them because, apart from usually believing what it is told, the prevailing schema of values has society respecting businesspersons infinitely more than artists. (It is one reason why artists, even when attaining great wealth as artists, seek renown as businessmen and businesswomen as well, pursuing such recognition like some latterday patent of nobility. "I'm not just an actor! I'm a businessperson!" Because I slapped my name on some crappy products.) It is all so pervasive that even people who ought to know better seem less cognizant of the pattern than they ought to be. (Thus did the usually very incisive Peter Biskind not call it out in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, all too often presenting much more conventional morality tales about talents ruined by their own hubris when recounting the shattering of those careers.)

It seems to me--and if I may so, a great many others--that the folks in Hollywood really in need of supervision--in need of adult supervision--are the ones who think that because they have big offices and wear expensive suits they are adults who know what they are doing, even as all they really seem to know how to do it is put holes in their company's balance sheets.

Wish's Opening Weekend: How Did it Do?

I wrote this after the first weekend but I was delayed in putting it up. Here it is anyway--with an update.

BoxOffice Pro projected for Wish a $35-$44 million gross over its first Friday-to-Sunday period--and $49-$66 million over the five-day Wednesday-to-Sunday period of the long Thanksgiving weekend.

As it happens the film made less than the bottom end of the range for the 3-day period over the whole five-day period--a mere $32 million (of which a bit under $20 million was collected over Friday, Saturday and Sunday). This is significantly below expectations that were already weak to begin with for a major Disney animated release (indeed, were weak for such a film even before being revised considerably downward this past month)--to say nothing of a movie that seems to have initially been conceived as a grand 100th anniversary event celebrating the founding of the historic studio.*

Of course, as I keep saying cinematic hits may be becoming less front-loaded, and we forget that at our peril. Certainly box office watchers were quicker than they ought to have been to write off both those Disney releases Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Elemental (both of which had better than expected holds, with Guardians in the end looking respectable, and Elemental going from flop to hit in the process), while this very weekend the Hunger Games prequel had a better than expected hold itself, indicating some hope for a movie that had also had a disappointing debut. The holiday season seems especially likely to work out this way for Disney releases. (Remember, even before the pandemic upended the film market, how things went for Mary Poppins Returns?) Of course, it will take quite the multiplier to make even the low end recently estimated for the whole-run gross possible--even quintupling the five-day gross does not get one much further than $150 million or so, beneath the bottom end of the range Boxoffice Pro anticipated for the movie a week before its release ($165 million). Still, it may be safest not to rush to the cry of "FLOP! FLOP! FLOP!" just yet.

* The expectation for the three-day period as of a month ago had been $45-$65 million, and $64-$94 million for the first five days in release.

UPDATE: Wish has had its second weekend which saw a 61 percent drop for the film from its unprepossessing opening, leaving it with a mere $42 million after ten days--less than the bottom end of the range for the first three days in the first Boxoffice Pro forecast. The result is that it will be tough for the movie to get to $100 million, never mind $165 million (or the near-$300 million previously treated as a serious possibility).

On the Routineness of Ex-Special Forces Protagonists in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

I recall running across a gripe session on a discussion board among people annoyed with the trope of a zombie apocalypse scenario where the hero just so happens to be ex-special forces.

There was more in the way of amusing cracks than genuine insights into the matter, but it still got me thinking about just why we see so much of this. One way of looking at the matter is to say that the reason there are so many such characters in these stories is that they are such natural protagonists for them--people trained for combat, survival in harsh conditions, etc. having skills that would be very useful indeed in such situations, and besides being helpful to them potentially helpful to any group of people they link up with.

But people sure have seen it a lot, so much so that it seems predictable, and "convenient," and trite.

That suggests another, larger, problem--namely that there has been so much writing in this genre for so long, so that like any genre that gets so deeply exploited for so long it is tired. The issue, then, seems less the kind of protagonist than the fact that people had seen this story so many times before.

And that in turn suggests a bigger problem still--that we are overdue for some new genres with which to amuse ourselves. Alas, pop culture is stuck in a rut—likely because everything else is too.

Social Withdrawal as Social Protest

Considering the issue of social withdrawal I have generally found myself looking at reports on the matter from or about Japan, and discussion of the issue as it may apply elsewhere in the English-speaking press (mainly though not exclusively the American press). Recently, though, I happened on an item in the French newspaper 20 Minutes discussing the topic, which caught my attention right away with the title: "Hikikomoris français: 'J’ai fui le monde car il était trop dur, trop brutal, trop insécurisant, trop injuste, trop dégoûtant.'" Translated the quotation, from one of the article's interview subjects, says "I fled the world because it was too hard, too brutal, too insecure, too unfair, too disgusting."

I have long tended to the view that there is something of this view of society in much of the social withdrawal we see (in regard to work, for example), be it the milder forms of withdrawal in which people may hold a job, etc. but do the absolute minimum to survive and keep aloof from other people at all other times, or the more severe forms we see, as with the hikikomori who refuses to even come out of their room and face their family--but the preference has long been to see it as a matter of individual pathology, etc.. However, here we have an explicit social criticism on the part of one of the sufferers, who flatly says that he found the world outside unbearable--a reaction hardly implausible given how society is structured, how people treat each other, and the rest, and especially how all this is felt at the "sharp end." The fact that the response to such criticisms so often tends to be sneering callousness ("Welcome to the real world!") only underlines the fact--and suggests that those seriously interested in where the world is going would do far better to put such phenomena in their proper context than, in line with the conventional, cowardly, mediocre norm people treat as mature and pragmatic, deny the existence of any context at all.

"I Never Rewrite!"

Read much about writers with any amount of attention and you will come across quite the number who claim that they never rewrite their own work.

Read their remarks with attention and you also note that, if true, this is because they can count on others to do it for them--because, frankly, they are prominent enough to be indulged that way.

The rest of us, alas, can only dream of ever enjoying anything like such privilege, leaving us enduring the process--and, unpleasant as it is, probably producing a better result for it a fair amount of the time.

Just What is an "'80s Jerk?"

I recall years ago happening on the Teen Titans, Go! episode "Nostalgia is Not a Substitute for an Actual Story." For the most part the episode was up to the standard of the show's very good best, but I was confused by the discussion of "'80s jerks" as a particular, distinctive, type.

That confusion did not prompt me to look into the matter--but more recently I found myself running across items that discussed '80s pop culture as featuring mean-spirited characters out to wreck the hero's effort to attain some goal, often without there being much practical gain in it for them, and wondered whether there was any substance to this at all.

Assuming that there is indeed such substance one possibility is that this truly standard storytelling element seems '80s because after the '80s the big movies that had a chance to make a significant pop cultural impression had less room for such jerks--because of the way big splashy action movies crowded out the littler comedies and light dramas where they tended to feature. Thus the bad guys were not mere jerks, but rather something grandiosely malevolent in very high-stakes situations (like a Thanos).

It may also be that as the "cult of the asshole" grew and grew the default level of "jerkiness" we came to take for granted meant that even where they could possibly have made an impression jerks of the old kind would scarcely be noticed--the more in as the hero themselves was now likely to qualify for "jerk" status themselves. (How else would you characterize Tony Stark, certainly in his Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnations? Or the more recent incarnations of Batman as Hollywood embraced the idea of "Batman as unhinged fascist?")

Considering all that, even granting that unlike some others I do not think film is exactly suffering from a lack of small-time villains motivated by petty or pointless meanness, it does seem to me that the way "jerk characters" have become less conspicuous reflects how film has become a good deal more limited than it used to be--all as the threshold for what constitutes insufferable behavior keeps rising.