Cory Doctorow's Latest at Pluralistic

I have long found Cory Doctorow a breath of fresh air in a dialogue where discussion of his areas of concentration are dominated by copyright Nazis and Silicon Valley hype-mongerers. And I am pleased to say that in spite of standing by positions anathema to the prejudices of the mainstream media he has now and then managed to secure a platform there from time to time. (I was recently surprised to find his writing on the "enshittification of everything" in the Financial Times.) Still, one would see only very little of what he produces in such places--Doctorow writing prolifically at his own site, Pluralistic, where I consistently find his posts worth not a mere skim, but a proper, word-for-word read.

Of course, having said that some of the pieces are more impressive than others. Last month I was most impressed with his posting on the artificial intelligence bubble, which seems to me even more timely now than it was amid the skyrocketing price of NVIDIA stock).

This month is not quite over at the time of this writing, but I think it safe to say that for me the winner is Doctorow's piece on the demise of Vice, which Doctorow very ably connects with, contrary to the idiot lies peddled by market populism-singing snake oil salesmen for Big Tech back in the absolutely deranged and deranging 1990s, the sewer of predatory practice that the Internet became--inevitably, given that the hard realities of power simply do not cease to operate at the edge of cyberspace.

Madame Web's Second Weekend

Following its underwhelming Valentine's Day debut Boxoffice Pro predicted a 59 percent drop in box office gross for Madame Web from its first weekend to its second, leaving it with about $6.3 million collected and a total of $35.5 million in the till after twelve days.

This was pretty close to what happened, the movie dropping 61 percent and taking in $6 million--rather than surprising the pessimists with a strong hold as it went on to redeem itself Elemental-style, or a dramatically worse-than-expected hold driving home the sense of catastrophic failure, instead simply living down to the low expectations for a film already deemed a franchise-ending flop.

Interestingly this is all as the box office shows signs of life, with the Bob Marley musical biopic the strongest earner 2024 has produced so far--while once again Japanese imports, particularly of the animated kind, score according to their more modest standard, the new Demon Slayer release living up to expectations with a gross of almost $12 million. Still, for the time being it seems unlikely that February 2024 will come close to matching the box office gross of February 2023, testifying to the generally depressed condition of the market, a significant part of the story of which is the extreme difference between Madame Web (12 days on, still a long way from the $50 million mark) and Ant-Man 3--which, for all the grumbling at the time, was a $200 million+ hit of the kind Disney-Marvel and everyone else only wish they had now. (What a difference a year makes.)

Just How Much Do Streaming Shows Get Watched After Their Run?

Last year Kimiko Glenn's sharing her residual check for her work on the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black during the actors' (and writer's) strike on TikTok got a lot of attention.

The document she presented showed that for her 44 episodes of work on the show that quarter she got . . . $27.30 cents.

This was, of course, reflective of just how tough those within that profession have it--even those who may seem as if they have "made it" (such as one would assume to be the case with someone appearing in so much of a hit series).

Yet, especially given the comparative novelty and obscurity of the process by which success in streaming is evaluated (it is a lot harder to judge this than, for instance, box office gross or Nielsen ratings), it has also occurred to me that it may reflect the changing dynamics of "content" transmission.

Again, there was a time when reruns of hit shows (and even not-so-hit shows) were a much more significant part of the viewing and pop cultural diet of the public. This was why we all knew that a beard like Mr. Spock has in "Mirror, Mirror" indicates the evil version of such a character; why wherever we go people still reference Seinfeld and the "golden age" of The Simpsons; why making feature films out of, for example, The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible seemed like a plausible basis for a hit.

It was all part of a less crowded, less fragmented, media world than the one we now live in--where people watched the same shows over and over again, the contents became a part of their frame of reference, and that in turn kept people looking at them, especially insofar as they still had a limited range of options (fewer channels, carrying less original new material, and so filling their hours with a good deal of old content). By contrast the way content made for premium streaming especially is fenced off from all but the subscribing audience (in contrast with old sitcoms that you might just run into on multiple channels) makes it less accessible to begin with; the hyper-abundance of options at all times that always includes a veritable onslaught of new choices; and perhaps the slighter "rewatch" value of what we get in an age which seems to have forgotten all about, or rejected, old-fashioned easy viewing and its pleasures; makes it harder and harder for anything to entrench itself "in the zeitgeist," either on a first airing or through being seen over and over again.

The result is that while I do not doubt for a moment the exploitative character of contemporary production, Ms. Glenn's check may also, in its way, hint that just a few years on that show millions were watching is being looked at it comparatively little, certainly in comparison with those old staples of prime time TV that became staples of non-prime TV in time.

Wall Street is Acting Like the Singularity is Here (Again)

A couple of years ago, considering in hindsight the way that the capitalization of the stock market exploded in 1994-1999 (growing 20 percent a year), it seemed to me that in its "irrational exuberance" Wall Street was acting as if the Singularity had arrived.

So does it seem to me now as the price of NVIDIA's stock soars.

Where its share price was $50-$60 at the end of 2019, and amid the ups and downs of the subsequent pandemic (which had its share of financial insanity as the Federal Reserve turned on the monetary spigot--remember the Gamestop stock foolishness?) topped out at about $300 before dropping into the $100-$200 range in late 2022, has surged from that point to stand at $788 now, more than ten times its late 2019 value even after adjustment for inflation.

The story goes that this is all because NVIDIA's prominence as a maker of AI (Artificial Intelligence) chips.

It is probable that very, very few of those involved in these machinations have any idea what AI chips actually are, but they are excited because they know they have something to do with artificial intelligence, hype about which has gone through the roof and beyond since Open AI's release of Chat-GPT amid a frenzy of media claquing (with even the "awful warning" stuff of the credulous Ezra Klein variety playing its part), and that is good enough for them.

For now.

For my part, I remain, as I was last year, less impressed with the technology and its possibilities, Cory Doctorow summing up the situation all too succinctly when he observe[s] that "we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job," as you are likely reminded every time you call customer service, get a phone tree, and then beg to talk to a human.

Madame Web's Opening Weekend: A Few Thoughts

Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast for Madame Web anticipated a three-day (Friday-to-Sunday) gross in the $25-$35 million range.

Over the following four weeks the figure dropped repeatedly to more like $14-$20 million on the day of release--a forty percent fall. Meanwhile the film's six-day gross between its Valentine's Day release (February 14) and the conclusion of the four-day President's Day weekend (February 19) looked as if it would fall short of the bottom end of that initial projection for just the three-day period.

As it happened this was pretty close to the actual course of the debut. Over the Friday-to-Sunday period Madame Web pulled in about $15 million, and $26 million over the whole six day period.

For comparison purposes, Ant-Man 3 made $120 million in just the Friday-to-Monday period on this same weekend back in 2023--five times as much.

That film, considerably better-received than Madame Web, saw its legs buckle very quickly, the movie grossing 56 percent of its entire take by President's Day. Especially in light of its even longer opening (six days instead of four) and word-of-mouth being so unlikely to save this one (the Rotten Tomatoes score that was so appallingly low last week has actually fallen further), I do not expect this movie to do much better than that--with the result that (again) I would be very surprised if it got very far past $50 million--much more so than if it fell short of $50 million.*

The story hardly seems following much further than that--but there does seem to me something worth saying about the remarks of the critics, specifically their function of damage control reminiscent of what we saw with Captain Marvel 2. "Yes," they say, "this movie is a failure, and not simply because of Russian robots and trolls and so forth, but because it is just not a very good movie. And yes, we've had a lot of this with superhero movies lately. So those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies."

Pay special attention to that last part: those studios had better get their act together and make better superhero movies. Such remarks have as their function heading off any suggestion that the situation has anything to do with a genre that has been exploited very intensively for a very long time being run down by this point ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), let alone the model of filmmaking by which Hollywood has lived so long being in crisis--just the studios getting complacent, sloppy, flabby. They just need to get off the couch and diet and get back in shape!

As I have argued again and again, I see abundant reason to think the trouble goes way, way deeper than that. But just as the claqueurs will not tell the public that, the courtiers to the Hollywood elite will not tell their patrons that. The question, then, is whether that elite is intelligent enough not to trust its sycophants.

Alas, "intelligent" and "Hollywood" have not deservedly been spoken in the same sentence very much for a very long time--all as, sadly, the culture of the elite C. Wright Mills described so well favors always speaking "to the well-blunted point" and "soften[ing] the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view," rather than facing the facts and thinking hard about how to really deal with them, with results we see all around us every day in this Age of Polycrisis. Hollywood shows no sign of being an exception to that unhappy pattern.

* Last week the critics' score was 18 percent; now it is 12 percent. Meanwhile the audience score is 56 percent. By comparison Ant-Man 3's less than brilliant scores were 46 and 82 percent, respectively.

Can Hollywood Survive the Demise of its "Blockbuster" Filmmaking Model?

As I have remarked many a time (because the claqueurs and courtiers of the entertainment press are so much in denial about this) what Hollywood has been looking at since 2023 is a crisis not just of the superhero film ("I Don't Wanna Hear About No Superhero Fatigue!"), even if that is the most conspicuous aspect of the situation, but a crisis of its filmmaking generally--and in particular a crisis of the high concept model that has prevailed since the 1970s that has so come to center on franchise-driven sci-fi-inclined action movies, and lavish animation tending toward family audiences and musical comedy.

Accordingly, while others are asking "Can the Studios Retool their Superhero Movies so they can be Winners Again?" I think it more worthwhile to ask "Can Hollywood Survive the Demise of its Filmmaking Model for the Last Half Century?"

That question leads to two others, namely "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-going?" and "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?"

Why does the question of the blockbuster model lead to the others? Where "Can Hollywood Survive the Collapse of Theater-Going" is concerned the simple answer is that since the advent of television plunged Hollywood into crisis in the 1950s, and sent theatergoing plummeting (between 1948 and 1969 Americans went from going to the theater thirty times a year to doing so just four times a year, which has remained the average), the kind of movie we identify with the blockbuster is what has kept Americans going to theaters at all--with its one last card left to play the offer of big-screen spectacle, mainly of the sci-fi action-adventure and splashy animated extravaganza types.

Consider what this means in actual dollars and cents terms. In the years before the pandemic (2015-2019) domestic ticket sales came to about $14 billion a year in today's terms, half of which money the studios got--with this increasingly coming from the blockbusters (the top ten movies alone accounting for about two-fifths of the ticket sales by the end of that period). Those theatrical successes, one should add, were also the basis for big earnings from post-theatrical revenue, as with streaming and home entertainment generally (which often added almost as much to a movie's bottom line as the studio's cut of ticket sales); and money from spin-offs and merchandising; while the domestic earnings were typically more than matched by what the movies made overseas in the case of these kinds of films.

As the studio executives learned the hard way after many, many losses, the economics of straight-to-streaming releases simply do not allow for that kind of money-making--such that they found that funding blockbuster-budgeted straight-to-streaming releases did little but run up their debts, and have since tended toward smaller projects in that medium (to the point of finding a Batgirl, too small for theaters, too pricey for streaming, and just burying the movie). Indeed, streaming success often seems a reflection of cinematic success. (For all its undeniable failures, where would Disney Plus' line-up be without the cinematic success of Star Wars and Marvel?) Certainly it says something that people will watch a streaming spin-off to a cinematic hit, but that tying a theatrically released movie too closely to a streaming show is self-defeating (as Marvel demonstrated time and again, with Dr. Strange 2, and Captain Marvel 2).

In short, without the blockbuster studios have little to keep people coming to theaters--while without the money to be made from the theatrical release and all to which it can lead the blockbuster makes little economic sense--leading to the second question "Can Hollywood Survive the End of its Global Dominance?" For the blockbuster was Hollywood's area of "comparative advantage" relative to the rest of the world's film-making. Others could make, for example, a small domestic drama or romantic comedy that would play in their home market just as well as Hollywood fare of the type, or even better because it was made just for that country and its culture. They could not match Hollywood's big budgets and the spectacle they bought with any regularity until at least very recently (when the growing wealth of China's domestic market, and the determination of the Chinese government to develop this particular industry, had the country backing such movies), all as Hollywood retained a global advantage with regard to stars, franchises, business relationships and the rest. Without the blockbusters Hollywood has that much less to offer the rest of the world--and becomes just one more movie-making outfit on a planet full of such outfits clamoring for an audience that are in other ways no less dynamic, and perhaps more so. (Consider, for instance, the successes that Japanese animation, or Korean film and television, have enjoyed in the international market as of late.)

Can Hollywood survive the demise of its model for making big hits, generally and in relation to its position within a global cinematic marketplace? Yes . . . but most likely as a shadow of its former self, a much-reduced industry living on smaller productions with ever less cachet than before outside North America; a bigger version of, for instance, British film and television, rather than the Center of the Media Universe that it was in its twentieth century glory days. The result is that for Hollywood overcoming the crisis of its model in one way or another--either finding a way to keep that model viable, or finding a substitute that similarly plays to its strength--has the highest of stakes, all as they are led by, well, not heroes to "match the mighty hour." Indeed, I can picture a couple of decades from today Tinseltown's executive suites packed with old men and women mentally stuck in a past more congenial to their sense of self-importance, or grumbling bitterly about how things were "Back in my day," until they drive to distraction the younger persons around them holding what remains of the industry together.

Announcing . . . College English: Modern Literature: Key Concepts

I spent two decades teaching English composition at the college level. In the process I became increasingly dissatisfied with the conventional ways of going about the task--not least, a lack of focus and straightforwardness in explaining the basics of the subject. From my attempts to do better I eventually produced a book following that more straightforward approach, College English: Composition: What Your Textbook isn't Teaching You.

The book, which came out way back in the pre-pandemic, pre-GPT-3.5 year of 2019 got a sufficiently positive reception that I decided to extend my thus far one-volume College English series with a book that would do something similar for modern (post-1700) literature. Specifically it covers a good many hazily discussed essentials of the subject in that more focused, straightforward, rarely-too-attempted way--starting with just what literature actually is anyway (extending to who decides that, and how), and then moving on to concepts ranging from Neoclassicism to naturalism, from Romanticism to postmodernism, while filling in the gaps with examinations of topics ranging from the novel to the ever troublesome relationship between the writer and the politics of their day.

The book is now on sale at Amazon and other retailers. Get your copy today.

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.