James McDonald Reviews The Best American Short Stories 2023

Last year the literary critic James McDonald asked "Where is Our Zola?"

A partial answer to his question would seem to be "Not in The Best American Short Stories 2023" to go by his review of that collection last week, the subtitle of which is "A Step Backward," referring to the movement of the included stories and authors away from meaningfully dealing with the world in which we live.

McDonald also leaves no room for doubt about the reason for the unhappy situation--namely that longtime editor Heidi Pitlor, more or less in line with the tendency of the "scene" to which she belongs, "speaks for an affluent segment of the population . . . academia . . . the publishing business," such that while she has "a good ear for sentences" (the Cult of the Sentence strikes again!) her "social outlook ventures no further than upper middle class preoccupations such as identity politics," with all the blinkers implied about her and her colleagues' perspective. (In pointing this out McDonald incisively points to Pitlor's remark about how in the pandemic "we were all working . . . at home"--the reality for editors and suchlike, but not for working-class folks, and a good many non-working-class people besides.)

Particularly worth noting is McDonald's challenge to the claim of the anthology that it presents "the best" stories of the year. As McDonald notes, what we have here are a mere twenty stories, three-quarters of them taken from a mere half dozen publications, and a fifth from just one. (Four stories from The New Yorker. Ugh.) A case of looking for one's keys under a streetlight, the extreme elitism of the presumption (that what is "best" is to be found in this tiny and extremely exclusive slice of even what the literary magazines have carried), is "hard to maintain," even before one takes into account the intellectual limitations of those making the selection --a thought I have had myself back when I was reviewing "best of year" anthologies with some regularity. Back then, because I had already come to understand how unbelievably closed the magazines and publishing generally are to the vast majority of would-be authors, and still had illusions that the web would provide the excluded some chance to be heard (long since crushed), I picked up such volumes hoping to see that by way of some obscure online outlet some gem came to the notice of the world and was recognized by inclusion there (or at least, that we had something from an author truly from outside the "club"). I was disappointed every time--and dare say that nothing has changed since. I dare say, too, that just as this seems to me one of the factors that has left science fiction increasingly stagnant, so has it been unhelpful from the standpoint of the long overdue regeneration of a contemporary literature.

Announcing . . . A Century of Spy Fiction, Second Edition

Back in 2019, feeling myself done writing about spy fiction for a good long while, I put together a collection of my writings about the subject and published it as A Century of Spy Fiction: Reflections on a Genre.

As it turned out I was not quite so done with the genre as I thought at the time. (The few years after were eventful ones, after all--for the world, and if not for the spy novel, then at least the spy film.) The result was that last year, after revising and updating some of the older material, and combining it with new items (many previously unpublished), I published a second edition of the book--now on sale at Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today.

The 2024 Super Bowl Weekend Box Office: A Few Comments

It has been some time since I have had occasion to offer my thoughts on the domestic box office of a whole weekend, rather than how one particular film did.

Still, in light of last week's remark about the state of the box office in 2024 that took in the beginnings of February, this one seemed to offer enough grounds for a collection of limited comments to warrant just that.

According to Deadline it was another underwhelming weekend. The highest-grossing film actually made less than $7 million--Argylle, which with just $29 million grossed after ten days has confirmed its flop status and, again, remind us of its genre's declining salability).

Mean Girls, another disappointment, is still just a little short of the $70 million mark its predecessor of two decades ago so easily sailed past in a time when the dollar was worth almost twice what it is today.

And the Disney-Pixar theatrical release of Turning Red has not improved on the unfortunate performance of Soul, the movie falling short even of this weekend's very weak top ten with a mere $535,000 collected from over 1,500 screens. Whatever Disney's leadership had been hoping for when it came up with this scheme, it seems safe to say that it has not happened.

The Deadpool and Wolverine Trailer: Some Thoughts

Deadpool's first appearance on film was in 2009's Wolverine. Of course there was no direct follow-up, but Deadpool did get his own movie seven years later as part of FOX's broader X-Men franchise, and now in the threequel (which has seen that franchise folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) just as FOX has been folded into the Disney portfolio) Deadpool and Wolverine are together again--hence the title the studio is going with for what many have up to now simply been calling "Deadpool 3," as we can see in the recently released trailer.

What can I say about it? It strikes me that the movie endeavors to retain the spirit of the Deadpool franchise, while extending that ceaselessly fourth wall-breaking, "ironic," attitude to the goings-on to the bigger MCU of which the figure is now a part, as Deadpool reminds us within the first few seconds of the trailer. (A throwaway quip highlights that this is a Disney production . . . in an entirely Deadpool way that I will refrain from repeating here.) Indeed, the trailer struck me as more interested in impressing the metafictional aspect of the movie on us than in giving us a very good understanding of just what is going on here.

Will it bring in the fans?

Being less enthused of Deadpool's antics than most I may not be the best judge of that. I expect hardcore Deadpool fans will be enticed by what they see here--but it, of course, takes more than bringing out the hardcore fans to score the kind of billion-dollar gross the original Deadpool did (when its ticket sales are adjusted for current prices), a feat which has been very, very elusive for movies of this kind this past year. I expect that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine being an important part of the proceedings will help somewhat, but let us not forget that along with the MCU the X-Men franchise of which he was a part also became very well-worn even before the pandemic did its damage to the box office. (Remember 2019's very ill-received Dark Phoenix?) Accordingly I stand by my earlier prediction for now--an extreme range of $150 million-$700 million for the global gross, with $400-$450 million seeming to me the portion of that in which the movie is most likely to finish up.

Madame Web: The Opening Weekend Forecast From Boxoffice Pro

Madame Web hit theaters Valentine's Day. Right now Boxoffice Pro, the projections from which continue to edge down in the way seen over the last two weeks, have the movie making $14 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period, and a mere $20 million in its first five days of release. A drop even from the $15-$24 million the publication projected for the Friday-to-Sunday period last week, it seems to me that the movie will have a tough time getting to the $50 million mark, let alone up over it--the more in as I see little evidence that word-of-mouth will save this movie. The Rotten Tomatoes score is actually 18 percent for this one--while just in case the reader buys into all the sneering about the calculation of such scores, it seems entirely consistent with the evident reaction to go by this verbal survey of their assessments, while this review over at Polygon seems representative, if also better-written, than most.)

Considering all this let us acknowledge that there is a lot less riding on the success of Madame Web than was riding on, for instance, the success of Ant-Man 3 this same weekend last year. It is a much smaller production than that $200 million spectacle, with not nearly so important a function within its franchise than the launch of the MCU's "Phase Five" that movie was accorded--all as the bar for success is a lot lower these days. (Remember, last year Ant-Man 3 was judged a flop for bringing in a bit less than a half billion dollars--while by the time Captain Marvel 2 rolled around numbers like that looked positively enviable.) Still, it will hardly be what Sony is looking to hear as it engages in what the critics are denouncing as a cynical yet incompetent attempt to create a new cinematic universe around the success of the consistently most salable superhero of all as the genre falls apart, while that seems the case simply because they seem to have lost all thought of anything but sticking with the increasingly flop-ridden path they followed in an increasingly remote heyday for the field.

Madame Web's Projection Slips Again

NOTE: I was delayed in putting this one up, but as it was already written and relevant to the more current post put up today, here it is.

Boxoffice Pro's first published long-range forecast for Madame Web (January 18) had the movie making $25-$35 million over the three-day Friday-to-Sunday period of Valentine's Day weekend--a far cry from not just what a Black Panther or a Deadpool made over the same time frame, but even what Daredevil did back in 2003.

The figure was already clearly slipping a week ago (February 1) with a $25-$35 million projection down to $20-$29 million last week.

Now (February 8) the projection is down to $15-$24 million--a 30 to 40 percent slippage of the range as a whole from what had initially been expected. The projection for the overall gross of the film has fallen with it, though not by as much. From $56-$101 million it has fallen to $42-$78 million.

This will, of course, be the publication's long-range forecast, the movie to be covered by the weekend forecast next week, as that is when it will actually hit theaters. But given the trend of prior weeks it seems plausible that there will be at least a little more slippage--and as I have often found, when the forecast keeps falling, there is a fair chance that the movie will do even less well than the bottom range of the forecast. (Recall, for instance, Expendables 4--a movie to which Madame Web seems a lot closer in level of anticipation and prospects than even last year's superhero flops.)

The result is that at this stage of things I think the film will be doing well even to gross $15 million, and would be much more surprised if it broke the $50 million mark than if it finished its run under it.

A Few Thoughts on the Box Office in 2024 (So Far)

As I remarked in a recent post the January 2024 box office has been, to put it mildly, disappointing for Hollywood. Rather than improving on last year as might have been hoped in a situation of continuing "recovery," adjusted for inflation gross ticket sales were down 18 percent from January 2023--and indeed, down by at least half compared with the pre-pandemic average (2015-2020).

Yes, half.

Part of the story, admittedly, is that the holiday season preceding it was very weak, the recovery in revenues evident in the spring and summer slowing greatly in the fall as franchise films (Captain Marvel, Aquaman, etc.) continued to fall flat with audiences, but, in spite of overperformance by hits like Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film, none of them grew into a Super Mario Bros. or Barbie (or even Oppenheimer or animated Spider-Man)-scale event of the kind adequate to rescue the season. Indeed, the highest-grossing movie to come out in the last five months of the year was actually Wonka, which (on the way to merely sputtering past the $200 million mark) collected about $63 million in January--as against the $283 million that Avatar 2 collected the same month the year before (after having already taken in $400 million in the last days of December).

However, it was also a matter of January's offerings being less than thrilling for the public. The highest-grossing January release by far, the remake of Mean Girls, is exemplary. The original 2004 Mean Girls collected some $86 million at the domestic box office--equal to $140 million when adjusted for December 2023 prices. As of its fourth weekend in domestic play, with not much further to go, the new version has made less than half that ($66 million).

Also indicative of the situation is what has come thus far of the attempt of a very cash-hungry Disney desperate for some success in its traditional domain of animated feature film after these last terrible years to exploit January's long being a good time for rereleases by putting out the three big Pixar movies that lost their chance at a big theatrical gross due to the pandemic. Soul, the first in the schedule, had its release back on January 12, in a not insignificant 1,360 theaters.

The movie made a million dollars--almost.

Not almost a billion, almost a million.

This bodes poorly indeed for the next film in the queue, the culture war-stoking Turning Red (due out Friday), all as February has already proven dismayingly January-like. This weekend the megabudgeted ($200 million+) Argylle, which may have come from Apple+ but really only makes financial sense as a blockbuster, came out with low expectations, and failed to meet them. (Boxoffice Pro projected $20-$30 million in its long-range forecast. The movie took in a mere $18 million.)

Looking at the film I am reminded that while it is not a franchise movie of the kind that have been flopping left and right since about this same time last year one of the reasons why we had so many franchise films in the first place was because it had in this crowded, post-star, market become so difficult to get people to the theaters to see non-franchise films, even when they are big action movies.

That gross is a reminder, too, that if the difficulties of Argylle's particular genre are still getting less attention than those of the superhero film, the "spy-fi" action-adventure genre (as we already saw with the waning salability of James Bond, and the underperformance of the latest Fast and Furious and Mission: Impossible films last year) is likewise running out of steam, the boom that began in the '90s now going bust.

Alas, given what is evidently in the pipeline this is far from being the last such disappointment--all as Madame Web seems set to fix attention back on the superhero genre's troubles as it continues the genre's trend of falling grosses, and contribute to a weak February following the weak January the year has already seen.

Another Surprising Movie Review from David Walsh (of Yorgos Lanthimos Poor Things)

Reading about Poor Things in advance of the film's debut I expected a piece of postmodernist tripe. This is all the more in as it comes from Yorgos Lanthimos, director of such films as The Lobster, and The Favourite, aptly characterized by David Walsh as "marked by an overall chilly and self-conscious idiosyncrasy, and occasional misanthropy"--in the case of The Lobster a "facile misanthropy" that Walsh recognizes all too correctly as "one of the 'default settings'" of "independent" film.

The result is that I was very surprised to see Walsh present a very positive review of the movie as not only technically accomplished in respects or having the benefit of good performances (though he does praise both aspects of the film), but as a work which is humane in sensibility and socially critical in a meaningful way.

This is the second time in the space of about half a year that Walsh has surprised me with a favorable review of a major director of whose work he had been consistently very critical in the past--and indeed praised for eschewing the cheap irony and misanthropy that have been dominant since at least the '90s to take on serious subjects, seriously. (The other director he praised on such grounds was Christopher Nolan, whose Oppenheimer Walsh praised very highly.)

Considering this I find myself thinking of how many times we have heard about the "end of irony" these past several decades. Could the changing attitudes of filmmakers like Lanthimos and Nolan be a sign that we are really moving past that, perhaps because the world really is in a bad way, and the irony with which a certain kind of pseudo-intellectual has long blown off the fact has lost the last of whatever credibility it ever had for all save the truly, incurably, "ironic?" And that filmmakers (perhaps, along with many, many others) are really and truly starting to abandon the vanity, smugness, irresponsibility that are the great attractions of the ironic stance in favor of actual engagement with the world--and in doing so going after "bigger game" than the kind of subject matter so compelling to (to name but one example) the Gerwig loyalists? I reserve judgment about that for now--but it is something to watch for in the years ahead.

The Intensity of the Reaction to Greta Gerwig's Non-Nomination for Best Director

In light of the earlier hoopla for Barbie I was surprised when Greta Gerwig did not get a Best Director nomination for helming the film--and then completely unsurprised by the extremity of the "We was robbed!" reaction from her supporters.

This was in part because we see this kind of thing every year, for multiple films, if not always at the same level of volume and intensity. And that makes it worth saying something about that reaction as an example of a tendency I have written about in the past, namely just how disproportionate the volume and intensity of chatter about pop cultural product can be.

It seemed to me writing then that four factors were specifically noteworthy, namely

1. The Frame of Mind of an Audience Looking for Entertainment.

2. The Ascent of "Fan" Material in the Marketplace.

3. The Marketing of Popular Culture.

4. The Media's Obsession With Itself.

Spelled out in brief this means that:

People take their entertainment in a state of emotional vulnerability (they are sitting down to relax, letting their guard down, generally expecting to be pandered to), with all that means when things do (as when they are absolutely pandered to) or do not (as when they are slapped in the face instead) go the way they would like.

It is also the case that much of popular culture is connected with franchises whose members are more than usually emotionally invested in the material coming to the movie--to the point that one can say that they feel like they "own" it and are owed something by those who would create something out of it--amplifying their reaction to what is done with it, negative reaction included. And,

Finally a self-obsessed media relentlessly exploits controversy, and with it provocations and other expressions of ill will, in promoting its products, and itself, doing everything to feed a frenzy which eventually feeds on itself. (We see this even in such things as the way that people constantly use box office data to try and prove that the public is on whatever side of the argument they happen to be.)

Still, relevant as all this seems there is the plain and simple fact of what so much of the pandering and the offenses and the controversy has to do with these days (and certainly had to do with in the case of Barbie), what Richard Hofstadter called "status politics." Centering on issues of group status within society at large in ways not allowing of redress in any practical, material, way status politics (in contrast with "interest politics" where people have problems that are in a technical sense redressable) tends toward lingering on bad memories, bitterness, etc., and all that easily follows from them--not least a tendency to accord immense symbolic significance to minor matters, see offense anywhere and everywhere, make accusations accordingly, and treat any objection to one's behavior (that they may be acting unfairly toward others, for example) with complete contempt. (Postmodernism has, of course, reinforced this with its worship of "subjectivity," which basically means that people feel their selfishness and prejudices are sacrosanct, and no one can have a valid opinion contrary to their own--their "subjectivity" the only one that matters, or even exists.)

Certainly going by how many have viewed the film, from all sides of the culture war, as all but designed to stoke such politics; and certainly the way the movie was promoted, and large portions of the media embraced it; only encouraged this. The resulting, extreme, success of the movie at pushing "hot buttons" made the movie a hot button topic itself, and how the movie has been treated by the Academy (even if this remains to be fully seen) itself a status politics issue, with all the intensity that this prompts. That is to say that for status politics-minded "supporters" of the movie Gerwig's not getting nominated becomes about much, much more than one director not being up for one prize in one particular year. It was for them a test of the Academy's readiness to recognize equity across gender lines among filmmakers, and more fully display its respect for their understanding of social justice more broadly; and the Academy's declining Gerwig the nomination, even as they accorded the film so many other honors (in part, perhaps, because the movie having a Best Picture nod without Best Director or Best Actress can make the Best Picture nomination look like an empty gesture toward big movies, as with the one for Top Gun 2 last year), a refusal to do all those things in their view. Of course, even understanding the reasoning here not everyone will see it as valid--to regard it as plausible for them to attribute so much meaning to one prize--but again, such differences in attitude are in the nature of such politics.

The Theme Song for The Fall Guy

Recently thinking about The Fall Guy's old theme song I took another look at "The Unknown Stuntman," and, yeah, I'm reminded not just of how much that memorable theme seems to comport with a spirit other than the one the trailer conveyed, but how it belongs to another era in other way. This is not only a matter of the specific references--as with those to the singer's having "been seen with Farrah," and "gone fast with a girl named Bo" (though in fairness, how many members of the target audience for the upcoming movie would know who he's talking about going just by that information, let alone appreciate the humor in Lee Majors singing about "Farrah" specifically, or get why supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, if they recognize that name, is in the list at all?). It is also because through all of them the song references an era that saw, beyond any one celebrity or group of celebrities and the minutiae of their careers, a media world which still had screen stars and sex symbols, and in which one could expect to acknowledge that men are dazzled by screen goddesses' exceptional, conventional, physical beauty and the sex appeal derived therefrom without condemnation or hypocrisy and not bring upon themselves a frenzy of pearl-clutching (or even real) outrage for having done so.

How very, very different is this third decade of the twenty-first century (as one piece I ran into about the song made clear as I did my bit of research for this post)--and how very different is the movie version of The Fall Guy likely to be from what we remember, likely not to the film's advantage as either a piece of entertainment, or a commercial endeavor.

Madame Web's Boxoffice Pro Forecast, Updated

The week's Boxoffice Pro long-range box office forecast is out--with bad news for Madame Web. The already low expectations for its opening have fallen further--from a weak $25-$35 million over Valentine's Day weekend to a weaker $20-$29 million. In the process the $100 million bar that Boxoffice Pro calculated as within the range of the possible two weeks ago has just edged out of reach--a fairly impressive multiplier (3.5+) required to get the movie anywhere near that from the opening now projected for it.

Alas, a drop like this in the weeks before the movie's release often goes with the actual release being worse. At the moment I have little inclination to speculate too precisely--but I can fairly easily picture the movie falling short of $50 million in the worst-case scenario, rather more easily than I can picture it breaking the $100 million barrier at this point.

Hollywood has had a lousy few months since Barbie and Oppenheimer finished their parts in bucking up its performance, and is heading into a year for which expectations are muted relative even to an ultimately underwhelming 2023 (already followed by an underwhelming January 2024)--and this particular film will not do much to improve the prospect.

The January 2024 Box Office: How Did the First Month of the Year Go for Hollywood?

As noted here, 2023 went much less well for Hollywood than many thought it would at the start of the year--in large part due to the rejection of many tried-and-true-seeming franchises and even genres (the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero films, Disney animation, etc.).

Did the first month of 2024 provide any relief?

As it happened, in current dollars the gross was well down from that of January 2023 ($494 million versus $584 million), but one may argue for the prior year's January having been boosted by the behemoth that was Avatar 2--which took in so much in 2023 that it is actually #7 on the list of the year's highest-grossing in-calendar releases. Still, one can point out that it has been the norm for December to have really big movies still cleaning up in January, with the point underlined by what we find when we look at the average in the six year 2015-2020 (January 2020 included here because even if things changed just a little later that year that month at least went like a normal, pre-pandemic January), which had the grosses to show for it. Here are those grosses adjusted for December 2023 prices (change from which to January 2024 prices we can assume as negligible for the purposes of this calculation):

January Box Office Grosses, 2015-2020*
2020--$1.07 billion
2019--$993 million
2018--$1.19 billion
2017--$1.215 billion
2016--$1.346 billion
2015--$1.322 billion

In the above figures we can see a downward trend--but one can argue for 2015, 2016, 2017 having been really exceptional due to the surprise success of American Sniper and the particularly high grosses of the first two of the new Disney Star Wars films. Moreover, even January 2020 (which improved on January 2019 by almost 8 percent in real terms) was a more than billion dollar month in today's prices, with a gross at least twice as high as what January 2024 managed. The result is that one can see the January box office as down by not just 18 percent in comparison with 2023 (adjusting for inflation), but down by at least half from the pre-pandemic norm, with just 40 percent of the average January gross seen in 2015-2020 (circa $1.2 billion).

These are very discouraging numbers--underlining just how rough the year ahead could be for the battered movie industry.

* Current dollar data from the Box Office Mojo, adjusted using the Consumer Price Index.

The Decline of the Movie Star, Revisited

Way back in 2012 (which feels like both yesterday and an eon ago to me) I wrote a piece about what seemed the declining relevance of Oscar night. In the course of that piece I had something to say about what was already becoming a fashionable topic, the decline of the movie star.

All these years later it seems to me that the talk about the decline of the movie star was well-warranted, for exactly the reasons that many were raising then--the fragmentation of pop culture and the sharpening divisions among the audience, the ascent of franchises (and special effects) at the expense of actors, the social and cultural changes that have eliminated those niches that made actors into icons. Indeed, if anything all of this seems to me to have become a good deal more pronounced in those years, with this reinforced in particular by the changes in how we get our movies, reinforced by the pandemic. Less and less do we see them in the theater, which I think had its element of mystique--and more and more do we see them privately on smaller screens, and indeed via streaming services that have done as much as anything else to divide our attentions. Exemplary of this is how the funding of for-streaming content years ago got to the point at which really big movies with A-list cast and crew regularly get made and released ($150 million, $200 million, $300 million movies directed by the likes of Michael Bay and starring people like Ryan Reynolds), with many of us scarcely noticing they were there, let alone their "entering the zeitgeist."

Of course, the streaming services have been cutting back on their funding of "content" for a while now--indeed, in the case of WBD's Batgirl they have gone to extreme lengths to cut anticipated losses on what seem to them unpromising projects--but I do not see the landscape wholly reverting to its earlier condition, all as the decline of the theatrical experience seems likely to continue regardless as studios find their longtime formula for getting people to the theaters failing, and show every sign of incapacity of finding a new one. The result is that at this point I see just about no chance of the film star making a comeback as a pop cultural institution, however much some seem to yearn for its return.

How Did Aquaman 2 Play in China?

Back in 2018 a significant factor in the first Aquaman film's success was its exceptionally robust performance internationally, especially in China. Grossing just short of $292 million there, this made it the DCEU's sole billion-dollar success to date (and that when, five inflationary years earlier, a billion was worth quite a bit more than it is now).

Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.

This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)

The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.

* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.

Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster Tourmanent: Who Will Win in 2024?

For those interested in the commercial side of filmmaking Deadline's annual Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament always provides plenty to chew on.

I do not expect to see this year's list out until April, but with 2023 now several weeks behind us we have the box office grosses that are a major indicator of how things generally go, along with a fair amount of data about production budgets, between the two of which we have a plausible basis for hypotheses about a film's profitability. (You can see my thoughts about making such estimates here.)

Given that really high grossers were few this year, it is fairly easy to make guesses about the most profitable films. The top two spots seem likely to go to Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, far and away the highest grossers of the year. As to which of the two will get the #1 spot: Barbie made a bit more but also cost a bit more, while I suspect the Super Mario Bros. Movie will do at least a little better in home entertainment, so I would give it the edge in the competition--but not by much. I would be very surprised were the near-billion dollar-grossing Oppenheimer to not also make the top five, with the same going for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, as, underperformer that it was, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 could plausibly round out the top five.

Those who follow the Deadline tournament should remember that there is a separate list for the most "valuable" of the lower-cost, lower-grossing movies, and it seems easy enough to make some guesses about this too. Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (two movies made for $20 million or less with global grosses of $250 million+) are likely to be represented among the top lower-budgeted profit-makers, while the numbers may be similar for Sound of Freedom. Beyond that candidates get tougher to discern (as grosses drop, but budgets do not).

Meanwhile, in a year very crowded with losers I still expect to see The Flash, The Marvels, and Indiana Jones 5--as three movies that all cost $200 million+ and made under $400 million (below $300 million in the case of the first three, and barely more than $200 million in the case of The Marvels)--to take the top three spots, though I hesitate to rank them. (Indiana Jones 5 grossed much more but also cost more than The Marvels, at least, going by the reports I have seen, and it is hard to say whether the higher gross or the higher cost will matter more--especially given the likely claims partcipations will have on the revenue.) Disney's Wish, if likely getting a greater boost than these from home entertainment, will probably not be far behind, if the higher figures for its budget I have heard (another $200 million movie that has not made much more than $200 million) are to be credited.

Beyond that it is, again, hard to say, because there were so many high-cost underperformers. Consider, for instance, Fast X--which grossed $700 million, but may have cost $340 million, alongside such films as Mission: Impossible 7, The Little Mermaid, the latest Transformers and Aquaman films. Any one of these might take the number five spot--and certainly I will expect to see many of them filling out the remainder of the top ten should Deadline elect to publish those numbers. By contrast even lower-grossing films like Shazam 2, Blue Beetle and The Expendables 4, if making a lot less, also cost a lot less--sparing them at least this particular ignominy.