Went the Month Well? (And the Quarter?) The March 2024 Box Office

The box office receipts in January and February 2024 were significantly down from what they were a year earlier--the two months together down by perhaps a fifth relative to January-February 2023. A function of the lack of any Avatar-like holiday season hit, or even an Ant Man 3-like Valentine's/President's Day weekend release, to give the early part of the year a boost, it still threw more cold water on the hopes of some recovery of the box office toward its pre-pandemic norm.

Of course, many were more optimistic about March. That month had the second half of Denis Villeneuve's Dune, Kung Fu Panda 4, a new Ghostbusters movie and a Godzilla film opening. Of course, as I have been saying again and again, it is not just superhero films but franchise films of these types generally that have been suffering. Still, few have been ready to admit the fact, and anyway most professional commentators seem to be implicitly grading blockbusters on a curve (judging grosses they would have deemed mediocre pre-pandemic as brilliant successes now), and as it happens March 2024 did manage to beat out March 2023 with a gross of $753 million to $638 million, a decent 18 percent margin.

As a practical matter that still leaves the box office gross for the first quarter of the year well down from its predecessor (with just $1.612 billion as against the prior year's $1.722 billion), even before we consider year-on-year inflation (3.2 percent for the year, with this corresponding to the February 2023 to February 2024 period as wll).* Adjusting for the price rise works out to a first-quarter take down 9 percent from the prior year--all as the gross for the first quarter of 2023 was about 40 percent down from that of 2019, and halfway (48 percent) down from the 2015-2019 average.

Will things continue to improve from here on out? It is hard to say. If Godzilla was a decent performer on Easter weekend, it is a far cry from last year's The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a half billion dollar hit that did much to carry the month, the spring season, the year--all as I do not see any movie likely to be a hit on that extraordinary scale not only in April (indeed, Boxoffice Pro does not project even a single movie reaching the $100 million mark during the month) but the entire year's schedule. The result is that I expect April 2024 to look much more like January and February in relation to its predecessor than it would to March, as March's apparent improvement (which still left March 37 percent down from the pre-pandemic average) proves noise rather than signal--a matter of comparatively marginal money-makers being clustered together in between longer patches unrelieved even by hits on these modest terms.

Went the Month Well? The Movies of the March 2024 Box Office

After a depressing first two months of disappointment for box office-watchers this year hopes revived somewhat with Dune, and then after that the arrival of Kung Fu Panda 4, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and the latest Godzilla movie.

Just how well have these movies done?

The second Dune film has, after a month in release, grossed $252 million domestically. Given the release of the first Dune film amid the pandemic, and the fact that Dune's complex and fairly dark source material is less a simple crowd-pleaser than most sci-fi spectacles, it has been thought excellent. Still, the exultation over such a reception reminds one that the standard is not what it used to be, when more would have been expected from movies such as this.

Thus does it also seem to go with the others. Ghostbusters 4 seems likely to finish well below $150 million--a performance paling next to that of its predecessors (inferior even to the much-maligned 2016 remake of the original film).

Kung Fu Panda 4's gross, which has broken past $150 million (it stands at $152 million as of its fourth weekend), but will not get much past it, similarly leaves it the series' weakest in real terms. If the 2016 third film's gross was $143 million, adjusted for today's prices it would not be much short of $190 million. (It is also worth remembering that this movie was a success mainly on the basis of tripling its domestic gross internationally, in part by outearning its U.S. gross in the Chinese market then burgeoning for Hollywood. By contrast there is no prospect of this movie quadrupling its domestic gross globally this time, compounding the significance of the domestic take.)

Godzilla seems more promising--but again, it has had an $80 million domestic debut, suggestive even in a positive scenario of a close in the vicinity of $200-$250 million, making it another Dune-like earner at best. However, especially if one takes inflation into account, its gross seems likely to be no better than 2014's Godzilla or 2017's Skull Island in the end, and like the lot not quite first rank blockbusters of the ever more elusive billion dollar club (like last year's Easter weekend release, Super Mario Bros.).

All of this sufficed to make this March's box office gross healthier than what was seen in last year's post-Avatar 2, pre-Super Mario Bros. dip, but it seems notable that it still left this March with a mere 63 percent of the pre-pandemic average for the month (its $753 million better than last March's $638 million, but comparing poorly to the $900 million+ they averaged in current dollars, the $1.17 billion they averaged in real, inflation-adjusted dollars). The result is that it seems to me fair to take March as, if an improvement on prior months, also proof that franchise films remain a tougher sell than they used to be, and in line with the fact the American box office seemingly stabilized at a level well below what we saw pre-pandemic. Going by 2022 and 2023 I would say the range of what we can expect from here on out is an annual box office in the vicinity of 50-65 percent of the 2015-2019 average, with this year showing little sign thus far, or in what can be expected of its later releases, of making the top end of that range. This is all the more in as I expect April will see another dip, and disappointing as the summer of 2023 was (especially prior to Barbie and Oppenheimer saving the season in its last weeks), this summer looks weaker still--such that its opening with a movie titled The Fall Guy seems all too likely to seem "on the nose" before too long.

The Fall Guy: Thoughts on the "Everything" Trailer

Seeing the "Everything" trailer for the upcoming film The Fall Guy I get an impression of a significant contrast in marketing strategy with what the prior trailer presented. Where humor was part of the package on offer, and indeed an important part, this one sells the movie as an over-the-top comedy--very bombastically. (Does Ryan Gosling really warrant introduction as RYAN M@TH?RF#*&!NG GOSLING and Emily Blunt introduction as EMILY M@TH?RF#*&!NG BLUNT? My first thought is a solid "No"--and it is far from the only way in which I found this sales pitch exceedingly obnoxious and off-putting.) It also places a heavy stress on Ryan Gosling's being the lead, it would seem drawing heavily on the success of Barbie last year. (This seems the more significant when the protagonist is seen sitting in the cab of a truck crying to a Taylor Swift song.)

Will it work?

The high concept comedy, alas, was in much-remarked decline before the pandemic, and such seems particularly risky fare to launch that crucial first weekend in May (the more in as this film looked risky enough to begin with, given its playing off of comparatively obscure source material, etc.). Trading on good will from last year's hit is also a chancy strategy--putting me in mind of how many thought the good will toward Tom Cruise after Top Gun 2 would translate over to Mission: Impossible 7 being a particularly big hit. Alas, things did not quite go that way . . . all as it should be remembered that if we generally hear from those who loved "Kenough" there were plenty who did not (and indeed, some of this seems to have translated over to Gosling).

In short, this approach to selling the movie is a gamble with a movie that was a gamble to begin with--I suspect, more of a gamble than the backers of this film planned on taking when they thought "Let's make another movie based off an old TV show practically nobody remembers even though those haven't done well in a really long time."

Naturally it will be interesting to see how it plays out--for the disinterested. By contrast those who put up the money ought to be quite anxious as to the outcome of their bet.

What Are We to Make of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire Box Office-Wise?

Boxoffice Pro's last long-range forecast projected a gross in the $85-$126 million range, with which its final opening weekend forecast of $40 million was consistent.

It is worth remembering that this works out to, even at the high end, less than the much-mocked 2016 Ghostbusters remake made even before inflation ($128 million).

If we think in terms of inflation-adjusted numbers, it is much less than the 2016 movie made ($166 million in February 2024 prices), while that in its turn was much less than the gross of Ghostbusters II back in 1989 (which movie's $112 million take equals $281 million in today's money), a movie that was considered a disappointment at the time--because the original had made so much more (the first Ghostbusters pulling in $243 million, equivalent to a $729 million gross today, so that Ghostbusters II made only a little over one-third of what the first movie did).

The result is that if we look at the matter dispassionately we see Hollywood yet again venturing far, far down the path of diminishing returns with an '80s-era franchise in the usual, desperate and shameless, manner--the movie much more Indiana Jones 5 than Top Gun 2, and in the process extending the pattern of failure for such films seen last year.

Given all that the press and the chatter seem relatively upbeat.

Life After Ghostbusters II

It was, of course, the case that Ghostbusters II, while a big hit by almost any conventional measure (a near $300 million blockbuster domestically when we adjust its gross for February 2024 prices, which made it the fifth-biggest hit of the booming summer of 1989), was received as a big disappointment in 1989 (following up as it did the Avengers-caliber blockbuster that was the first Ghostbusters, a $700 million+ hit in today's terms).

Considering that movie I am struck by how the careers of many of those involved were on a downward trajectory afterward with respect to success in major feature film, with Ivan Reitman an obvious case. Besides having the Ghostbusters movies, in the '80s he scored big with Stripes, and Twins. The early '90s were not bad for him, with Kindergarten Cop, and Dave, reasonably well-received, but not on par with his prior hits, while Reitman's reteaming with Danny DeVito and that slapfight promoter who keeps dropping at every opportunity mention that he was once "governor of California" (1994's Junior) was received as a disappointment. Subsequently Reitman's remake of the French comedy Les Compères, which bringing together Robin Williams and Billy Crystal at the height of their careers, its Nastassja Kinski comeback hype, and June release date, was supposed to be the big summer comedy of 1997 . . . but wasn't. His next would-be "big comedy of the summer" Six Days, Seven Nights (which had Harrison Ford playing off of his Indiana Jones image) did not do much better than the preceding two movies, and his last would-be big summer comedy, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, pretty much proved the end of the line for Reitman as a maker of big studio comedies, with just a couple more lower-profile feature films following over the next eight years.*

As it went for Reitman, so did it go with much of the cast, particularly those members of the actual Ghostbusters team whose careers had been most flourishing in the '80s. Bill Murray, to whom the '80s had been very good outside the franchise (he also had Caddyshack, Reitman's Stripes, Tootsie, Scrooged), saw things go south for him in much the same way. If in the early '90s he still had What About Bob? and Groundhog Day he seems to have found hits increasingly elusive, especially in those films where he was actually in the lead on screen rather than making cameos, or just lending his voice (certainly to go by the responses to Larger Than Life and The Man Who Knew Too Little). Apart from his role as Bosley in the McG-directed Charlie's Angels apart (which he did not even reprise in the 2003 sequel, that job taken over by Bernie Mac), and his voice role in the two Garfield films from the early part of the century, he would seem to have remained prominent mainly as a regular in the films of Wes Anderson and like directors--critical darling's films that get glowing reviews and win prizes, but generally do not become big box office hits, his days as a head-liner behind him.** Meanwhile Dan Aykroyd's post-Ghostbusters II career, as judged by that standard, makes Murray's look enviable.

Of course, even with the second film's perceived underperformance, and these careers going south, the studio (Columbia/Sony) still wanted a third movie. Going by what has been reported about the efforts to make that movie it seems that legalities, personalities and the like played their part in keeping the project in "development hell." Still, I also imagine that had the careers involved been doing better there would have been a greater push to get another movie done sooner--and that we started getting more Ghostbusters this past decade has been a reminder of how the franchise-addiction Hollywood was already displaying in the 1980s has got worse, the Suits ever less willing to let any possibility go. (Which is how the aforementioned slapfight promoter got to be in Terminator 6.)

* After My Super Ex-Girlfriend (which also seems to have been a turning point of sorts for its stars Luke Wilson and Uma Thurman) there was just No Strings Attached (2011), and the sports drama Draft Day (2014), though Reitman seems to have continued racking up producer credits on major films he did not direct (like 2007's Disturbia, 2009's I Love You, Man, his son Jason Reitman's 2009 Up in the Air, the 2017 Baywatch movie, and the three Ghostbusters movies of the past decade).
** Murray's credits in Anderson's films include Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Isle of Dogs (another voice role) and The French Dispatch--nearly every one of the lot. Murray has also been in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers and two Sofia Coppola movies, namely Lost in Translation and On the Rocks.

Global Box Office Performance: Barbie vs. Oppenheimer

As I previously wrote here, Barbie and Oppenheimer could be credited with saving the summer box office with their late season appearance (the two movies together adding $1 billion that turned what had been up to that point, for all its richness in big releases, a lower-grossing summer than its predecessor).

Both films were also impressive performers internationally, and thus globally. Still, they were far from identical in that respect. Domestically Barbie made about twice what Oppenheimer did ($636 million vs. $329 million)--but internationally the gap was a lot narrower, Barbie making just about a quarter more than Oppenheimer ($809 million vs. $628 million), a much smaller margin, with Oppenheimer's performance coming so close the more impressive given its lack of any marketing hook to compare with association with a famous Mattel toy, greater demands on the viewer's attention, disturbing and downbeat subject matter, and more "adult" rating with its implications for accessibility (an R rather than a PG-13 movie in the U.S., with this probably not very different anywhere).

Going by those ticket sales it does not seem to me unreasonable to say that, compared with the North American audience, the international audience was relatively much more interested in Oppenheimer--with this reaffirmed when one compares how the film did in many a major market. In France, Germany, Italy Oppenheimer was just marginally behind Barbie (by a tenth or less); while in China Oppenheimer came out far ahead (almost reversing the pattern seen in North America, as there Oppenheimer outgrossed Barbie by almost two to one).*

The result is that while it would be an extreme exaggeration to deny that Barbie managed to "travel well" (there is no arguing with an $800 million gross here), Oppenheimer did relatively much better abroad than here, a fact that seems to warrant a good deal more consideration than the matter has generally been given in the press amid all its cheerleading for Greta Gerwig's movie in particular. One plausible hypothesis is that Barbie's concerns and viewpoint were more distinctly American (and even more than that, distinctly of the very limited portion of the American public represented by the mainstream of the media)--and those of Oppenheimer of more genuine interest for the world public.

* The grosses of Barbie and Oppenheimer were, respectively, $44 million to $43 million in France, $57 million to $51 million in Germany, $$33 million to $30 million in Italy, and $35 million to $62 million in China.

David Walsh and the 2024 Oscars

Given David Walsh's deeply favorable response to Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer from his initial review of the film forward to his consideration of the movie's reception earlier this month, it was only to be expected that it would be prominent in his piece on this year's Academy Awards.

As it happened Walsh devoted the first eight of his article's paragraphs to the significance of Oppenheimer's popular, and critical, success, and their connection with the political reality of the time--and only then turned to the broader ceremony. Still, it seemed significant there too. As Walsh remarked in a ceremony dominated by the reception of Oppenheimer (and where Poor Things, to which Walsh had also been favorable, also had a strong showing so that, as Walsh noted, the two films took eleven of the seventeen awards), "[t]here was less garishness and self-involvement on display than usual," and "the identity politics fanatics . . . relatively quiet after" as on the "whole, the awards ceremony left the viewer with the impression of great social and psychological tension bottled up."

While Walsh's annual coverage of the Oscars is an annual tradition I cannot recall him writing anything comparable about the event in the past--the subtitle of his 1999 piece ("Hollywood at its Worst") summed up his attitude toward the matter, and the last words of the item's first sentence (a "celebration of conformism, vulgarity and mediocrity") left no doubt whatsoever about exactly what he meant, with that description pretty much consistently applicable to every ceremony since down to last year's ("The 'safe,' 'familiar' and 'reassuring; 2023 Academy Awards: tedious, self-involved and distant from the population"). Even the more than usually charged March 2006 ceremony (recognizing cinematic achievement in the year of films like Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, the film adaptation of John le Carré's The Constant Gardener) struck Walsh as "a sad and painful affair," in which the limitations of any liberal or left tendency in Hollywood were all too clear. Those limitations seem to have been much on Walsh's mind again in Tuesday's piece--but all the same his reading and expectations of the situation seem very different, such that where two decades he thought of the fickleness of even the well-intentioned in Hollywood, it may well be that he sees Hollywood not bumping up against those limitations, but possibly beginning to surpass them, with all that implies.

On Oppenheimer's Oscar Win(s)--and Poor Things Wins Too

As my remarks here going back to January indicate (and as was reaffirmed by more recent comment), I expected that Oppenheimer would claim Best Picture, and so it has. After all, as a highly stylized three-hour mid-century-set biopic the movie appears to be "natural" Oscar material--with the movie helped by how so many of its rivals could appear too "lightweight" (as with Alexander Payne's The Holdovers), too little-seen (almost all of them save for Greta Gerwig's Barbie), too foreign (as with Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall) for the Academy's taste. It also had on its side Christopher Nolan's powerful cheering section and the readiness of many in and out of it to see him as unjustly denied recognition in the past, adding the "his turn" element to the mix--with all this seemingly reaffirmed by the movie's progressing from one victory to another at the season's various awards ceremonies.

Still, if the film's taking Best Picture (and Best Director, and much else) could seem predictable given what we saw these past few months, I had previously thought Barbie the more likely winner given the Academy's greater openness to its themes (the kind of thing the Academy loves to honor) than those of Oppenheimer (the kind of thing that in so many recent years scared off the Academy).* The result is that there is still an element of upset here, affirmed by how not Gerwig's Barbie but Yorgos Lanthimos' Poor Things came in second, taking four statues home (including a second Best Actress win for Emma Stone, and Best Adapted Screenplay), as Barbie not only lost out on Best Director and Best Actress at even the nomination stage of things, and in the "major" categories in which it was nominated (Picture, Supporting Actor and Actress, Screenplay), but ended up with only one win (for "Best Original Song").

It does seem possible to take this as a sign of change, perhaps in multiple, era-changing ways. Scarcely a few days ago critic Bernd Reinhardt remarked Mati Diop's film Dahomey taking the Golden Bear at the year's Berlin Film Festival, suggested that it was "an indication that the dominant influence of identity politics in the cultural sector is losing ground."

Perhaps this turn of events at the Oscars is similarly indicative of the trend. Still, even if this is so we may feel ourselves in only a very, very, early stage of such a process.

* The film won a total of seven Oscars. Besides Best Picture and Best Director there were two acting prizes (Best Actor for Cillian Murphy and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr.), as well as prizes for Original Score (Ludwig Göransson), Cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema) and Film Editing (Jennifer Lame) in what, if not a sweep, is not too far off from it either.

The 96th Academy Awards Best Picture Nominees' Chances: A Few Thoughts

Last summer, in the wake of the rapturous critical reception of Barbie, I thought it was certain to get Best Picture--but then Oppenheimer surprised me by winning over some very tough critics, and in the months since, dominating one awards ceremony after another. The result is that my intuitive guess has for some time been that it will win the Big Prize on Sunday night.

Still, that is far from a full consideration of the chances of the nominees (there are eight other movies to be thought about, after all), and so I found myself thinking about how they all stack up when considered in terms of factors more or less indicative of their chances (while, once again, setting aside any pretense that this is about "quality," so keep in mind I am not saying that any one movie here is better than another).

A Measure of Popular Success Goes a Long Way These Days
While box office performance has little-to-nothing to do with the actual quality of a film, the Academy (and other comparable institutions, one of which has gone so far as to produce the equivalent of a Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence) are concerned with popularity for the sake of keeping up public interest in the goings-on. As it happens of the ten films only two broke the now relatively modest $100 million barrier the extraordinarily weak box office year of 2023 (Barbie and Oppenheimer), only three the $50 million barrier (Killers of the Flower Moon also squeezed over the line to take in $67 million), and six have made $20 million or less (all of the rest except for Poor Things, which managed to take in half of what Killers of the Flower Moon did, with The Zone of Interest taking in $7 million, The Anatomy of a Fall taking in under $5 million to date and Maestro apparently enjoying only whatever minimum necessary to qualify).

Putting it another way, the issue is not just how much money Oppenheimer, and Barbie, made, but also how very little the rest made, that leaves Barbie and Oppenheimer with a considerable edge here over the rest.

A Best Director Nod isn't Essential--But it is a Favorable Sign
As I remarked in a prior post regarding Greta Gerwig's not getting a nomination for Best Director did not necessarily doom the chances of Barbie for winning Best Picture, other films having had that honor in spite of a lack of such recognition for the helmer (especially these days, one suspects, given the political pressure to spread the accolades around). Still, it is relatively rare. Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture only five have Best Director nods--namely Oppenheimer's Christopher Nolan, Killers of the Flower Moon's Martin Scorsese, Poor Things Yorgos Lanthimos, The Zone of Interest's Jonathan Glazer, and Anatomy's Justine Triet. This counts in those films' favor.

The "Lifetime Achievement" or "Making it Up to You" Element
Of the five directors who have been nominated, three have had prior nominations--namely Nolan, Scorsese and Lanthimos. Scorsese, of course, has ten nominations--but already has one win for his remake of the Hong Kong cinema classic Infernal Affairs (the wildly overblown yet inferior The Departed), and even if that was almost two decades no there is that much less reason for any rush to recognize him (especially because Killers of the Flower Moon has no "This is the one he will be remembered for" buzz). This means that this is more likely to work in favor of Nolan and Lanthimos--while the pressure would seem stronger in Nolan's case given that so many think him to have been so under-recognized in the past (because of his making Batman films and science fiction like Inception and Interstellar), while it might be added that he has a considerable popular cheering section in his corner such as, I think, Lanthimos does not (and so far as I know, Glazer and Triet do not, else we would have seen more people show up to their movies) . . ..

I am sure one can think of other factors than these, but you have probably noticed a pattern by now, namely that Oppenheimer again and again displays the advantage in the stakes, with its popular success, and the recognition accorded to a director whom some will see as entitled to "his turn," all as the competition is disadvantaged by the same factors (because "no one saw them," because of a lack of recognition of directorial achievement or pressure to reward them "this time")--all while Oppenheimer, as a lengthy period biopic with capital I Important themes and an ostentatious visual style is a natural for the prize in a way that much of the competition is not (because it is a brightly colored movie "about a toy," for example, or too light in tone in that "safe," familiar, Alexander Payne way, or disadvantaged simply by being "foreign" like Triet's Anatomy and Celine Song's Past Lives, etc., etc.).

The result of this little exercise is that Oppenheimer looks to me like even more of a lock for Best Picture than it was before--though of course the last act of Naked Gun 33 1/3rd--though of course, that particular ceremony had help from Lieutenant Frank Drebin of Police Squad and his colleagues.

The Claqueurs of the Entertainment Press and the Post-Pandemic Standard for Box Office Success

As my prior posts have made clear, 2023 box office closed on a very low note indeed, and thus far 2024 has confirmed those who thought the year showed every sign of being an even weaker one for the film industry. Of course, box office watchers had high hopes for the release of the second part of Denis Villeneuve's Dune saga, and the film seems to have lived up to their expectations that way, taking in $81.5 million domestically and another $97 million internationally.

It is a very respectable gross indeed--by the standards of 2024, which more than two years after the normalization of the box office seemed to be getting underway (with such successes as Venom 2, the Bond film No Time to Die, and of course, the near $2 billion phenomenon that was Spider-Man: No Way Home) the standard remains depressed, not least for what big sci-fi franchise spectacles like that one are expected to bring in. Just a few years ago an $80 million opening would not have been thought reason for the makers of a near $200 million-budgeted sequel of this type to crow like this, let alone declare an end to a box office drought (even before the massive inflationary shock of recent years that has produced a full-blown cost-of-living crisis forcing many to reckon with thelong-threadbare quality of their pretensions to being "middle class").

This was underlined for me by a recent Deadline piece on Anyone But You. The article's title promises that it will explain how the film became a "global box office phenom" that once again demonstrates the continued viability of a genre so many have written off, but again it is only a "phenom" according to a much reduced standard. The movie has barely crossed the $200 million mark globally, in part because it is far short of $100 million domestically, thus far taking in a $88 million. (For comparison purposes, just consider what these films made domestically, and at yesteryear's far lower ticket prices.)

The reader and watcher of the entertainment press now has to keep such things in mind as the claqueurs go on claquing, even when there is not much to claque about.

"When Can I Stop Rewriting?"

"Everyone knows" that rewriting is an essential part of writing--but as is often the case with what "everyone knows" we very rarely discuss it in an honest, helpful, way.

Consider, for instance, the matter of when it is that we ought to stop rewriting. Per the low expectations weary and cynical instructors tend to have of students the stress is on exhorting the rewriter to greater effort--rather than helping them make useful judgments about the very important matter of whether they have reached or even surpassed the point at which "more effort" is useless, or even counterproductive.

For my part I find that a point comes in my own writing when, as I reread and revise my work, I am no longer making "global" revisions, and the changes are all occurring at lower and lower levels--restructuring a paragraph here, later just restructuring sentences, later just tinkering with word choices.

All of this tends to reflect the fact that I am no longer revising what I say, but rather how I say it, and, with due regard for the importance of subtleties, smaller and smaller aspects of that. Indeed, rather than meaning I may by that point be thinking about niceties of form--the adjustments about switching something written in passive voice to active voice, or providing parallelism where it had been absent.

And while I am at it many of the changes may feel optional rather than strictly necessary--such that I find myself changing something, then rereading it, and deciding that it was better before.

Alternatively if I am still thinking about substantive changes late in the process it is likely that they suggest not a revision of the piece but a whole other piece than the one that I have written--one I might as well go ahead and write from scratch rather than going through the less efficient, more wasteful process of tearing up something that may be perfectly fine as is to produce something else out of the parts.

I think it safe to say that when you get to either of these points--the point at which the changes are increasingly minute, stylistic, optional; or at which the changes are not so much revision of what exists as writing something else (and again, this better done from scratch)--that you can take it as a good sign that you are getting near the end of the process.

The 2024 Box Office: Notes on the First Two Months

After an ultimately disappointing 2023, and its especially disappointing last third when no Barbie or Oppenheimer or Super Mario Bros. made up for the way the sorts of franchise films usually counted on to have blockbuster grosses kept flopping, hopes for 2024 were low--the more in as the studios bumped so many of what were supposed to be the year's big releases past December 31, 2024 in the wake of the Hollywood double-strike. (Exemplary of this is how this whole year will see just one Marvel release, Deadpool 3.)

This past January was entirely consistent with the grim prediction, the box office gross of January 2024 down 18 percent from that of January 2023, reflecting both the tepid performance of the holiday period releases normally carrying the box office in that month (like Aquaman 2), and the releases in January itself (like the disappointing Mean Girls remake).* February was worse still, the gross in February 2024 down more like 30 percent--a testament to how, much as there was disappointment over Ant-Man 3's gross, it towered over anything out so far this year, the backers of the year's Valentine's Day superhero release Madame Web only able to dream of their film making that kind of money.**

All of that leaves the box office take for 2024 thus far down about a fifth from what it was at the same point the preceding year (somewhere around $860 million as against the $1.08 billion taken in last year, before adjustment for inflation). Of course, at this point there are hopes for March seeing stronger ticket sales, with great hopes (apparently with some substantiation in advance ticket sales and the like) held out for Part Two of Denis Villenueve's well-received Dune remake. Where the first film made just $400 million in those months when the box office was scarcely starting its recovery from the initial shock of the pandemic, those bullish on the movie hope that Part Two will get to be the full-blown blockbuster that the first lost its chance to become, with the movie expected to take in $80 million in its opening weekend.

Still, such excitement over the prospect of a mere $80 million weekend tells us just how much the standard has changed these past few years (even before we start calculating for inflation, $80 million falls short of the 100 biggest weekends on record), while even if the film achieves that, and displays reasonable legs, it will probably end up not much above $200 million domestically. The result is that, assuming they too do as well as reasonably hoped, even with help from Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and the next Godzilla, March 2024 may end up not really improving on March 2023 much or even at all--and therefore not do much to close the gap, still leaving the first quarter of 2024 significantly down from its counterpart in none-too-prepossessing 2023.

* The January 2024 gross was $495 million, versus $584 million the year earlier ($602 million when adjusted for inflation).
** As of February 28 the box office gross for February was in the vicinity of $356 million, implying a finish in the vicinity of $360 million, versus $500 million in February 2023 ($513 million in January 2024 dollars).

David Walsh on Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War

Recently writing again about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer David Walsh reiterated his praises for the film, and especially what he thought most worthwhile in it--while paying special attention to both Nolan's address of the theme of nuclear war (drawing heavily on Nolan's surprising frankness, and boldness, about his views), and the media's comment about the force of the audience's response, especially the "astonishment" of "empty-headed commentators."

So far as Walsh is concerned the film "demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more substantial film work" that "appeal[s] to the viewer's mental powers," as against the "noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence," with the movie's themes precisely what drew the audience to it.

Alas, I have to admit that, in some degree, I remain among the astonished. I have long taken the view that when it comes to "the market," in contrast with the conventional wisdom about the consumer being king business generally decides what it is most profitable for it to have the consumer buy, presents them that take-it-or-leave-it , and they usually have little choice but to take it, be in the area housing, cars, consumer electronics, or anything else, because the alternative is to go without a practical necessity, even though they would prefer something else, and have that option if markets really worked the way the conventional wisdom insists they do (for instance, having the choice of cheaper, more durable goods rather than more expensive ones with features they find irrelevant or even destructive of value, as with so much of Silicon Valley's recent vile stupidities).

Yet I have tended to incline to the view that there is a good deal more congruence between what the consumer is offered in the world of pop culture and what they want. The consumer may take trash because they have been poorly educated, exhausted, stultified--enjoy a "pastime for helots" because they have been reduced to the condition of helots--but the point is that the unambitious, lowest common denominator character of the work meaningfully reflects what they can handle intellectually or emotionally. (As Steven Soderbergh put it a while back "There's a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad," and fewer people have been having it "really good.") Indeed, I have been prone to accept that, if at times in the past challenging movies have more frequently been successes, there were special reasons for that, which did not last long--that, for example, a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up became a hit mainly because it promised a then-groundbreaking bit of nudity and sex (of the kind that an appreciable audience actually wanted to see), that if the New Hollywood's decline was a matter of many different factors audience's appetite for such material was also finite relative to its openness to the splashy high concept then in the ascendant and dominant ever since.

Still, Oppenheimer's American gross was not simply a matter of suckering in audiences on the opening weekend, but sustained success as it displayed remarkable legs, grossing four times its opening weekend take in a feat few movies accomplish, while the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a truly fresh 91 percent. And of course the movie tripled its massive domestic gross globally, performing well in market after market. (Indeed Walsh, who rarely pays much attention to box office grosses, spends quite a bit of time parsing the numbers in demonstrating that, yes, people really did get interested, really did go for it.) As a result there is far, far too much evidence here of audiences responding to what they saw for one to blithely dismiss it as a matter of Midcult-devouring middlebrows claiming to like what they think they are supposed to say they like. And in fact it has me rethinking my position. I am far from convinced that we will see the multiplexes packed with serious adult dramas, even of more conventional character, anytime soon--but it may well be that there is a good deal more openness to such drama than those of us who pore over box office data have been given reason to suspect in a long time; and that, as Walsh also suggests, it may be a matter of the dark times the global public is living through forcing some hard rethinking about life, the universe, and everything.

Christopher Nolan on Nuclear War

It is a testament to the insane overhyping of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years, the pervasiveness of the tedious Luddite-Frankenstein complex view of AI, and the extreme failings of the media generally (not least its treating tech billionaires as all-knowing oracles), that when Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer came out--a movie about the making of the atom bomb, at a time when with every headline the danger of nuclear war should have been more and more on the minds of the commentariat, what the members of that commentariat all wanted to talk about was . . . the supposed danger of AI research (with this the more foolish because their concern is less the misuse and abuse of AI by human decisionmakers than AI itself somehow becoming malevolent).

Still, if they preferred to ignore the nuclear theme and fixate on their morbid Terminator fantasies (overlooking how it was nuclear weapons that actually enabled AI destroy humanity in that 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger B-movie so many treat as a philosophical treatise on the subject), Christopher Nolan, who often in the past had been evasive about his politics in interviews (lamely telling Rolling Stone that The Dark Knight wasn't political), discussed his views on the subject with an interviewer from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in quite frank fashion before Oppenheimer's release. In the course of said interview Nolan discussed growing up in England in the 1980s, amid what is today remembered as the "Euromissile crisis" and the Second Cold War, and the prominence of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as how it pervaded pop culture at the time (Nolan recalling first learning of Robert Oppenheimer from the lyrics of the Sting song "Russians"). Nolan was also forthright--indeed, brave--in pointing to his film's relevance to the present, and not least the war in Ukraine, and how what he hears "not just from Putin" but "from both sides of the political spectrum" frightens him, leaving him "feel[ing] we're in a world now where people are starting to once again talk about those things as some acceptable possibility for our world," with "normalizing . . . atomic weapons" likely to lead to "to larger- and larger-scale conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet" (in a way that few others have pointed out).

Given how much coverage the film has received it is surprising how (relative to it) little coverage these comments of Nolan's have got, the commentariat (at the very least) simply not interested. Still, for his part film critic David Walsh has taken the view that the broader public that made of the movie a near-billion dollar hit--a Batman-like success, especially if one grades it on the post-pandemic curve so many others so readily apply to more conventional blockbusters like Marvel films--has not missed the movie's relevance. Arguing that it has indeed come out for this demanding, dense, idiosyncratically structured and shot, three-hour R-rated biopic in large part because that relevance struck a chord with them, as seen in his latest piece on the subject of the movie's reception a scarce week and a half before Hollywood's Biggest Night, and this movie's likely capturing the Biggest of that night's prizes.

Does Sora Represent the Beginning of the End for Film and TV Production as We Know It?

Back during the Hollywood strikes of last year the rights of writers and actors with regard to the usage of their work to train the artificial intelligence (AI) that many anticipate replacing some or all of what they do were a key point of contention.

This was an entirely legitimate concern for the writers and actors to have, given that even a slight chance of artificial intelligence doing just that justified their attempting to protect themselves (certainly in the wake of their experience of the streaming boom). Still, as one less bullish than most on the relevant technologies I have been skeptical that the day when AI really could do all that the actors and writers fear (and the executives doubtless hope). After all, consider how in the 1990s we were made to expect that the stars of today would soon be seen interacting with the stars of yesteryear on screen as a matter of course; and just a little while after, that the day had come in which fully computer-generated backgrounds would replace traditional sets. In both cases the technology was oversold--and the fact proved again and again over the years (as when Rogue One presented Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarquin).

However, the chatter surrounding Open AI's Sora is making me wonder if the moment when the technology does start to really matter in the ways they talked about might not actually be so far away. Granted, it is months away from being usable by the public, and thus far produces only short videos with significant imperfections--but it is easy to picture a more developed, more robust, version, backed by human clean-up efforts, enabling a film studio (as against some casual online user) to deliver the equivalent of today's megabudgeted blockbuster fare at considerably lower cost, enough so that they will find it cost-effective to make parts of movies this way, and eventually whole films. The result is that the writers and actors who fought to secure rights within this particular contract battle may have been not only prudent, but prescient, in their stance--and their defeat in that battle potentially catastrophic for their professions.