Ridley Scott and History on the Big Screen: A Quantitative View

Recently discussing Ridley Scott's track record as a maker of historical epics I went with my own impressions of his movies, and what seemed to me the views of the professional critics, both in their generality and the remarks of a specific few I think more incisive than the rest. Subsequently it occurred to me to check out what the numbers on Rotten Tomatoes say about the matter regarding those films I think qualify as such epics (1492, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Exodus, The Last Duel and now Napoleon).

Where those films are concerned the single most poorly reviewed movie was the Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, with a thoroughly "rotten" 31 percent score, while the Columbus quincentennial film 1492: Conquest of Paradise was only marginally better reviewed, with a 32 percent score, and Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood got only slightly better scores than that (40 and 44 percent, respectively). At the other end of the spectrum Gladiator got a "fresh" 79 percent score, and The Last Duel, if a far weaker box office performer than Gladiator, actually got the best score of the lot (85 percent).

By that standard Napoleon, with its 50 percent score, would rank as one of Scott's stronger efforts. Still, it seems worth acknowledging that the critics, going by the score aggregator, have got a lot more generous in their appraisals over the years. In spite of the complete lack of evidence that movies have got better over the time frame (and I think, plenty of room to argue they have got worse), the average score for a wide (1000+ theater) release jumped 15 percent between 1998-2009 and the first three-quarters of 2019 (from 44 to 59 percent)--while that can in cases look like an underestimate. (Consider the 40-point gap in the scores critics gave Top Gun in 1986 and the scores critics gave Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, even though they were "basically the same movie," even in the view of many of their admirers.) If one subtracts 15 percent from Napoleon's score then one ends up with a score of 35 percent--putting the film all the way down with the Columbus movie and company, near the bottom of the list.

Will history bear out that judgment? We'll see in the years ahead--perhaps, by seeing that no one is seeing the Napoleon movie at all.

Has the Entertainment Press Still Failed to Grasp the Reality of the Film Market?

In considering the answer to the question that is the title of this post I think it fair to say that, as one always deriding the generality of the entertainment press as claqueurs and courtiers of the industry about which they write (epithets mild next to the ones they truly deserve) I am perfectly aware that what they say is not necessarily what they actually think--with the gap between one thing and the other likely to be especially large in this period of extraordinary turmoil for the industry.

That said, it has been impossible for commentators desirous of retaining any credibility at all to avoid offering some acknowledgment of what has been happening in the year that saw its first really big release, Ant-Man 3, noticeably underperforming, and The Flash, Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2 all flop. But all the same, I find the folks at Screen Rant predicting a $1-$1.2 billion gross for Deadpool 3. Looking at that I find myself thinking of how at the start of 2023 they predicted $1 billion for Ant-Man 3, more than that for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 ($1.2 billion), and only slightly less for Captain Marvel 2 ($950 million). They were way off on all three counts, and in the same direction, and I can only suspect that the optimism about Deadpool is more of the same--while I find myself also noticing that in a Deadline piece warning that they expect the box office to bring in a billion less in 2024 than it did in the still rather weak year of 2023, still assuring the reader that there is "hope" in the year's 31 tentpoles.

Looking at that list of "tentpoles" I see not the solution to Hollywood's woes, but the problem--that in 2024, just as in 2023, even after the bumping of a number of films by the historic "double strike" of Hollywood's actors and writers, the release slate is packed with a lot of very costly movies that the public is just less and less interested in seeing; with more shameless retreads of stuff gone stale, epitomized not just by the plenitude of new superhero films even as the genre seems to be collapsing in the manner of the musical back in the '60s (like a Madame Web movie to which very few seem to be looking forward) but by how far back the studios are reaching for past hits to which to make sequels (like Twister from the summer of 1996, and Gladiator). The movies will play, few will come to see them, and Hollywood will again and again record colossal losses on balance sheets already drenched in red ink--all as the chances of surprise hits like Barbie doing something to save the day look very slim indeed this year.

"Hollywood's $9 Billion Year"--and the Year That Might Follow It

The press has been abuzz with talk of 2023 having been a $9 billion year for Hollywood.

This sounds better than it really is.

Every year in the 2015-2019 time frame broke $11 billion, while adjusting the sums for the highly inflationary years since puts their average at $14 billion. The result is that in actuality the North American box office gross was not quite two-thirds of the pre-pandemic year in real terms--and only a relatively slight improvement over 2022's gross (from about 54 to 64 percent of the pre-pandemic norm)--in spite of 2023 having had the first truly packed slate of would-be blockbusters since 2019. Indeed, the situation suggests something more troubling than a mere one-year shortfall--namely that Hollywood's model for generating hits increasingly looks broken, with one megabudgeted franchise film after another flopping hard, and the box office carried by idiosyncratic hits such as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Barbie (the two by themselves selling almost 14 percent of all tickets sold during the whole year), as well as Oppenheimer, Taylor Swift: The Era Tour and Five Nights at Freddy's, while Marvel, the DC Extended Universe, Fast and Furious, the Transformers, Mission: Impossible, Disney-Pixar animation and even Indiana Jones (to say nothing of second-stringers like Shazam and The Expendables) flopped, flopped and flopped again.

All of this bespeaks a Hollywood studio system on very shaky ground indeed--with 2024 looking no better, and indeed, even Establishment industry publications prepared to acknowledge that it is set to look worse, with an already stalling box office recovery going into reverse, with a Deadline piece predicting that 2024, between its thinning slate and viewer sentiment, could pull in just $8 billion. This would, of course, not just be a $1 billion drop, but work out to a lot more films than came out in 2022 making no more in real terms than the movies of that year managed to do collectively. It is the last thing Hollywood needs--and indeed I find myself wondering just how much more the studio system can take before the end of the pretense of "recovery" and "business as usual."

The Hollywood Box Office, 2020-2023: How Did Hollywood's Revenue Fare Over the Period as a Whole?

I recently wrote about the box office of 2023 as, if entailing a measure of improvement over the preceding year, still leaving Hollywood, in spite of a full slate of movies and generally "normalized" behavior among the public, grossing less than two-thirds of the pre-pandemic norm (64 percent of the 2015-2019 average).

How does that leave the four years of the 2020-2023 period as a whole looking next to those which came before? Consider the figures for the four years below--the current dollar figures presented first, the inflation-adjusted (for 2023 dollars) figures in the parentheses after.

2020--$2.114 billion ($2.489 billion)

2021--$4.483 billion ($5.041 billion)

2022--$7.37 billion ($7.674 billion)

2023--$8.906 billion ($8.906 billion)

The grosses over the four years come to $24 billion--as against the $56 billion the box office could have been expected to amass had grosses simply continued in line with the 2015-2019 average ($14 billion a year), a shortfall of almost three-fifths. One may add that these troubles have been compounded by comparable shortfalls in the overseas markets, in part because the same dynamics are at work there, but also because that key foreign market, China, has been less receptive to American product. (Consider how in 2019 Marvel's three movies released in China made just a little under $1 billion, while its three releases in 2023 made just a little over $140 million, less than by far the lowest-performing of the 2019 releases managed all by itself, even before we bring inflation into the picture.*)

Meanwhile the problems raised by the shortfall in revenues is compounded by the way in which the disruptions of production and release by the pandemic (and the higher interest rates affecting all business) ran up costs, all as the studios were sitting on a mountain of debt amassed during their insane binge on streaming content.

Of course, the business press point outs that some of the studios, at least, have been making an effort to get their financial houses in order (Warner Discovery's paying down of its debt much discussed in particular). Still, it looks like a long road to anyplace desirable from this standpoint--with the difficulties projected for 2024 (a year in which even Establishment analysts think the box office gross may be even lower than it was in 2023), and the inertia of the studios with regard to practice even as their longtime model for generating hits collapses (the superhero film looking like the old-time musical, etc.), not making that road any shorter or easier.

* In 2019 Avengers: Endgame pulled in $614 million, Spider-Man: Far From Home $199 million, Captain Marvel $154 million. By contrast Guardians of the Galaxy 3 made just $87 million, Ant-Man 3 $39 million, Captain Marvel 2 $15 million (a 90 percent drop relative to the original)--again, all before inflation is factored in.

What "Genre" Can Mean: Revisiting the Issue by Way of Spy Fiction

Recently revising the essay collection A Century of Spy Fiction (the second edition of that book is now out) I had occasion to think specifically about the way the histories of the genre tend to be British-centered--so much so that it is common for those writing that history to pretty much dismiss any American spy fiction produced before the 1970s. Of course, the more time I have spent actually looking at the relevant works the more I am struck not just by how much American spy fiction there actually was, but how many works within it deserve better than the dismissal. (Does it not seem worth noting that, in addition to such relatively well-known works as Richard Condon's The Machurian Candidate, Upton Sinclair, author of classics like The Jungle, produced a noteworthy early spy series in his Lanny Budd novels? Or that Kurt Vonnegut produced Mother Night? How about works like Jack London's The Assassination Bureau?)

Still, it seems to me fair to say that while Americans were writing spy fiction, the British had created a genre of spy fiction. There was a tradition and a counter-tradition here, with its founders and its orthodoxy and its subversives, its formulas and its fandom and its lore. Thus did William Le Queux and Edward Phillips Oppenheim establish the spy story as we know it with works like Secrets of the Foreign Office and A Maker of History, giving us the kind of characters, the kind of situations, that the genre has tended to deal in ever after. Le Queux's Duckworth Drew is the prototype of every "international man of mystery" since, while in A Maker of History we have the starting point for those tales where some innocent but hapless individual finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy--and all this was carried forward by writers like John Buchan (a great admirer of Oppenheim) in his Richard Hannay novels. Not long after others responding to such images of the fictional spy offered their own, very different, tales, W. Somerset Maugham quite conscious of what he was doing when he subverted it with Ashenden, and the same going for the parodic and satirical works of Eric Ambler (who was aghast to have ignorant critics mistake his mockery of Oppenheim's "bad prose" as his own "bad prose"). And so it went from there, with Ian Fleming in his James Bond stories giving the Duckworth Drew type an update, all as he made overt allusion to Oppenheim, to Bulldog Drummond, to Ambler.* (Indeed, in a reminder of how much the books were parody to begin with, Bond read Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios on his flight to Istanbul right before, in significant ways, recapitulating the foolish adventure of that book's protagonist in many ways.) At the same time the James Bond image played its part in John le Carré's conception of the extreme opposite character in a secret agent who was a short, fat, bespectacled and much-cuckolded philologist. And so on and so forth, down to the present, with Roman Pearce telling us in Furious 6 that this "007-type s--t . . . is not what we do!" (though of course it was exactly what they did from here on out).

By contrast, there is far less evidence of the authors of the American works I have mentioned being part of a self-aware collectivity --of, for example, Vonnegut's Mother Night being significantly allusive toward or even inspired by other spy novels, American or otherwise. (Rather, as the title suggests, it is Goethe's Faust that Vonnegut seems to have most in mind.) Indeed, historians of the spy story seem to think of those later American spy novelists of the '70s and after have come to be thought of as latecomers to an old British tradition--which fact has in itself left critics less aware of older American spy fiction, with the pattern of neglect self-reinforcing.

Of course, none of that diminishes what authors like London or Vonnegut accomplished, but it does suggest there being less accomplishment than might otherwise have been the case. That the writing did not produce a genre can seem to indicate that it did not make the impact it might have--while it may be that the existence of a genre furnishes writers with possibilities and inspirations whose benefit they would otherwise lack. Simply put, the fact of writers picking up what others did and reacting to it, extending it, turning it around, if most obviously encouraging activities like parody more broadly encouraged them in taking up "different ways of seeing"--what Ambler gave us, which included parody but was certainly not just parody, is partly a matter of his following after writers like Oppenheim. What le Carré gave us likewise seems to have been a matter of his coming after people like Fleming. And so on. Considered in those turns it would seem that, far from genre being a bad thing, it at least has the potential to be a very good thing, so that rather than the existence of genre work being a problem the problem would seem to be that these days the genres we have are fairly stale, that new genres do not seem to be emerging the way one might hope--and that the creatively stultifying demands of the crass and vulgarian marketing departments contribute to the problem by demanding writers bash their square pegs until they fit into the round holes the Dauriats of publishing-land are prepared to afford them.

* Thus does Gala Brand of Special Branch in Moonraker dismiss spies like James Bond as "people that Phillips Oppenheim had dreamed up with fast cars and special cigarettes with gold bands on them and shoulder-holsters," while in their confrontation aboard the Orient Express in From Russia, with Love, Red Grant warns Bond that "Bulldog Drummond stuff" will not get him out of the corner he is in.

Top Gun 3 is More of a Gamble Than the Commentariat Realizes

We are hearing now that Top Gun 3 is in the works.

Back in the summer of 2022 this looked like an obvious move.

It looks less obvious now.

Why is that?

The simple answer is that where back in 2022 it seemed that franchise action films were doing as well as ever on the whole, and leading the recovery, we have watched them underperform severely, and indeed flop, flop and flop again through 2023 across the whole range of film genres--superheroes, spy-fi, you name it. The films of Tom Cruise have not been excepted from the pattern, with Mission: Impossible 7, in spite of initially strong expectations (bolstered by the good will that Top Gun 2 seemed to have garnered him), proving a low point for the franchise commercially (in real terms, a weaker earner than 2006's ill-fated Mission: Impossible 3).*

In considering that the going may have got a lot rougher for movies of this kind it is worth remembering that, even if Top Gun 2 might have been a hit in other circumstances, that it was such an extreme outlier (a $700 million hit domestically and $1.5 billion globally post-pandemic, success that seems virtually magical right now) was due to the very special conditions of its release. While no one else seems inclined to acknowledge the fact, it mattered greatly that the movie came out with the media cheer-leading for it breathlessly, as it faced very limited competition in theaters compared to most summers (very few other action movies playing in the summer of 2022).

Moreover, the movie was in the view even of many viewers favorably disposed to it substantially a do-over of the original--a thing they were ready to forgive after thirty-six years, but which simply will not work with another sequel coming so soon after the second film, while just continuing things also will not be easy, the more in as so many take the two films as bookends to "Maverick" Mitchell's career (with the original depicting rebellious young Mitchell making his mark, and Top Gun 2 showing the matured leader Mitchell leading one last mission and moving on). Trying to come up with something that will not feel like a cheap do-over for the sake of a cash grab to the fans, while still feeling connected with the preceding films is a much, much taller order than those who made Top Gun 2 had to fulfill, one with which Hollywood has consistently shown itself to have a hard time. (Cheap imitation is just what they do--as that second Top Gun movie, again, showed.)

So any Top Gun 3 will be hitting a much tougher market, not just with regard to audience receptiveness to this kind of movie generally, but this film franchise specifically, and the level of competition the movie is likely to face in any major release date. Moreover, —it is worth remembering here that the margin of profitability here may differ from that of even most big-budget films. Those attentive to the figures published by Deadline about the movie's box office performance may recall the exceptionally high bill for participations and residuals--$315 million, close to twice the cost of the production ($177 million). This took a very big bite out of the profits indeed, and if the money was so good that this still left the movie the second most profitable of 2022 (after only Avatar 2) the money men have to think about such things when they consider the prospects of a Top Gun 3.

All of this probably still leaves Top Gun 3 about as safe a bet on a big-budget franchise as can be hoped for these days when even the runners of the James Bond series, the Star Wars franchise, even the Marvel Cinematic Universe are squeamish to the point of stalled--but, again, that is a long way from how things seemed a year ago, and a reminder of just how much the cinematic market has changed these past few years.

* Mission: Impossible 7 made $568 million, against the $600 million or so Mission: Impossible 3 made in inflation-adjusted terms back in 2006.

BoxOffice Pro's Prediction for Madame Web is Out (and Not Looking Good)

Boxoffice Pro has produced its first long-range projection for Madame Web. Right now their tracking-based estimate is that the movie will open to $25-$35 million and have a final North American gross in the $56-$101 million range.

This is a long way from the openings for other Valentine's Day weekend superhero releases like Black Panther (a whopping $202 million in just its first three days of the long weekend in 2018) or Deadpool ($132 million in 2016). It's even a long way from what the much-maligned Ben Affleck-starring Daredevil scored two highly inflationary decades ago (pulling in $40 million on the same weekend back in 2003, which is equal to $67 million today)--and one might add, the success of its fellow Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU) franchise Venom (whose second film's $90 million opening back in late 2021 was a milestone in the box office's post-pandemic recovery).

Still, this is a relatively low-budgeted film about a comparatively obscure character put out there in a time of declining, not rising, prospects for the genre, without a particular hook or gimmick (Deadpool's beat-the-audience-over-the-head-with-its-obnoxious-postmodernism, the political claims made for Black Panther, etc.), with all that implies for what constitute reasonable expectations. (Indeed, looking at the numbers and the rest I find myself thinking of how Madame Web compares to the comparably priced and better-known Batgirl--which, of course, the WBD decided not to release in the end, apparently in favor of taking the tax break.) It does not help that the movie seems to have got off on the wrong foot publicity-wise--the consequences of which The Marvels made all too clear last year.

The result is that Madame Web having a box office performance in the vicinity of Blue Beetle or The Marvels seems eminently plausible--while I have a far easier time picturing the movie doing worse than doing much better than what BoxOffice Pro projects, something to keep in mind as they update their projection over the coming weeks.

In the End, Just How Did Captain Marvel 2 Do at the Box Office?

According to Variety The Marvels is now available on Apple+ and Amazon Prime--scarcely two months after it hit theaters.

How has the movie fared up to now? Going by the pattern I had seen with the preceding four Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films I had noticed that their global grosses dropped 20 to 50 percent in inflation-adjusted terms relative to the prior film in their series (Thor 4 vs. Thor 3, etc.). Out of that lot Captain Marvel 2 seemed most comparable to Black Panther 2 (as a movie that, following up a sequel released near the peak of excitement about the MCU, and paralleling it in other ways, and which enjoyed exceptional success accordingly) its drop would be nearer the high end of the range--so I guessed that, given the $1.4 billion to which the first Captain Marvel's gross ($1.13 billion) amounted in mid-2023 dollars, the final take would be in the range of $600-$700 million.

Of course, the year went on becoming less and less kind to franchise films like this one at the box office--and a lot went wrong for The Marvels, not least the promotion proving exceptionally weak (unhelped by lackluster trailers). The result was that tracking-based estimates a month before the movie's release suggested something far lower--Boxoffice Pro projecting a domestic gross in the $120-$190 million range, from which I extapolated a global gross in the $250-$500 million range. Alas, over that remaining month this already low expectation all but collapsed, with not just the $190 million looking less and less likely, but even the $120 million, which came to look like ceiling rather than floor for the range with Boxoffice Pro's last long-range forecast lowering the estimate to $85-$125 million.

As it happened, the movie made just under $85 million in North America at last check (roughly equal to what the first Captain Marvel had made only partway through the film's second day in release)--and another $121 million globally, leaving it with a total of $206 million grossed (about equal to what the first movie made in North America in about its first week).*

This was a fall not of 50 percent, but of 85 percent, an absolutely catastrophic collapse that had the movie grossing less than even the notoriously catastrophic The Flash. Indeed, to call The Marvels the Solo of the Marvel Cinematic Universe can seem to understate the disaster. (After all, that movie made almost $400 million back in the summer of 2018, which is more like a half billion today--the kind of sum that Marvel can only fantasize this one made, much as they would have seen that as a grave disappointment.)

This does not guarantee the movie the top spot in Deadline's inevitable list of the year's worst flops--but I think it safe to expect it still making the top five, even in this wretched year.

* The original Captain Marvel collected $115 million by the end of Saturday, and $215 million in the first eight days of its North American run--without adjustment for inflation (in which case the figures become $139 million and $259 million, respectively).

The Spider-Man Phenomenon

Of all the superhero film franchises we have seen in this century (and they are many) perhaps the most consistently successful, especially when we think in terms of single characters rather than whole superhero teams, would appear to be Spider-Man--as the table below shows, the star of eight live-action major feature films between 2002 and 2021 that have pulled in nearly $8 billion together. Equal to more like $10.5 billion in 2023 dollars, when adjusted for inflation (as shown in the figures in the parentheses), seven of the eight were billion-dollar hits (all but 2014's The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which missed the mark only slightly), with the first, one should remember, really and truly inaugurating the age of the superhero as a consistent box office-topper (Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man claimed the #1 spot at that year's booming box office, symbolically beating out the year's Star Wars film for the first time in the history of that franchise), while the last, Spider-Man: No Way Home, was a better than $2 billion hit in the pandemic-battered months of December 2021 and January 2022 that like no other movie of the prior two years showed that the box office was really and truly back.*

Real Grosses for the Spider-Man Films to Date

Spider-Man (2002)--$822 million ($1.393 billion)

Spider-Man 2 (2004)--$789 million ($1.273 billion)

Spider-Man 3 (2007)--$895 million ($1.315 billion)

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)--$758 million ($1.006 billion)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)--$709 million ($1.29 billion)

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)--$880 million ($1.24 billion)

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)--$1.132 billion ($1.349 billion)

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)--$1.922 billion ($2.161 billion)

It also seems notable that the Spider-Man franchise has got away with things that often fail to work for even very successful franchises. Thus have we seen Spider-Man: No Way Home incorporate all three versions of the twenty-first century big-screen Spider-Man into one two-and-a-half-hour "event" film, with the result not ending up dismissed as an overstuffed and overcomplicated appeal to nostalgia but the colossal "the box office is back" success I have just mentioned (all as the Marvel Cinematic Universe finds its intensive exploitation of its own shared universe a liability). Thus have we seen the Spider-Man saga branch out via the Sony Spider-Man Universe, parlaying the character of Venom into a series successful in its own right (with the first Venom, again, a billion-dollar hit in today's terms, and Venom 2 another milestone in the box office's recovery from the pandemic).** And thus have we seen Spider-Man also become the basis for that extreme rarity in American film, a major animated film that is not a Disney/Illumination-type comedy or musical comedy but an action-adventure that goes on to real box office success--such that as other superhero sequels time and again fell short of the originals at the box office and with fans, in cases seeing catastrophic collapse (most notably in the case of Captain Marvel 2), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse just about doubled the gross of the 2018 original to become the third highest-grossing movie of the year (after only Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie), and the highest-grossing superhero film, period, in North America.

All of this makes it a truly historic success--and it seems worth saying a word as to why.

As I have remarked in the past I think there is some room for argument for how audiences actually experience movies like these--whether they get into them in a conventional Goethe-Schiller dramatic way, identifying with the protagonists so that they follow their story breathlessly; or, as they tend to do in response to action films, more commonly respond in a more visceral fashion to a fast-paced spectacle, to the point that talking about "characters" is misguided or eyewash.

I have tended toward the latter view--especially where the more general, less sci-fi-immersed, audience is concerned. Still, I do think it fair to say at the very least that audiences may find it easier to get into some spectacles than others--that it helps when the imagery has a greater ring of verisimilitude about it, and is easily processed, so that it is less off-puttingly unbelievable and "cognitive" and alienating, with the result that superheroes operating in a grounded setting and relatively down-to-earth situations (a Spider-Man as against a Thor) have an advantage.

Meanwhile, to the extent that audiences can and do achieve identification with the protagonist to care about them it may help that, for the audience generally and perhaps the traditional comic book target audience particularly, Peter Parker, may have an advantage. In a genre where the characters are principally adults with exotic backgrounds, and power, resources, status even apart from their superhero identities--aliens, demigods, plutocrats--Parker is a working-class orphan being raised by his aged aunt in Queens. Indeed, even amid media obsession with self-made rich men and tech billionaires that makes the public expect technical and scientific ability to go with wealth and vice-versa, instead of making of the scientifically talented Parker yet another inane Edisonade hero with which to propagandize the illiterate (a teenaged Tony Stark going from rags to riches and moving Aunt Bea and himself from the house in Queens to a Manhattan penthouse!) Parker is, in his normal, non-superhero life coping with the usual adolescent problems, like not having a lot of cash, and scraping by on the kinds of opportunities that might actually be open to an adolescent (more or less). By Silver Age comic book standards his story is practically "kitchen-sink"--and those who can "relate" to a comic book character likely relate to him that much more (even after they have grown up).

However, for all its advantages, and rule-defying successes, the Spider-Man franchise's power is going to be strongly tested this year as, in a year in which the Marvel Cinematic Universe is putting out just one film (Deadpool 3) the Sony Spider-Man Universe will be delivering three--a third Venom film, the Kraven the Hunter movie that was supposed to have come out last year, and a Madame Web film. Will the audience's appetite for more "Spider-Man Extended Universe" hold up through all of that? We will get a clue as to that when Madame Web hits theaters this Valentine's Day weekend.

* The 2014 film's $709 million gross in 2023 dollars ($912 million) rather more than any superhero movie made in the entirety of 2023. All calculations made from Box Office Mojo financial data, adjusted using the Consumer Price Index. Spider-Man was #1 in 2002, right ahead of Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones (which had to settle for the #2 spot, the first time that happened to a major Star Wars film, with this not repeated until the debacle of Solo in 2018).
** Venom's $856 million (helped by a spectacular performance in the overseas markets) in 2018 equals about $1.04 billion today. Later Venom 2 (Venom: Let There Be Carnage) was the first post-pandemic U.S. release to break the half-billion dollar barrier, and between that and its notably strong opening weekend a sign of the box office's recovery.

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."