Filming Dune: Messiah? (A Note on the Potential Obstacles)

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

With the second half of Denis Villeneuve's Dune out the verdict is in on the project as a whole. At the moment the reception for that second half, and arguably for the whole, seems stronger than that to the first half back in 2021. (The Rotten Tomatoes critics' score for Part 2 is 93 percent, while the ticket sales have been treated as cause for tears of relief after the prior lousy half year.)

It thus became easy enough to imagine Villeneuve helming a sequel after the first weekend in play, and indeed the word we are hearing now is that a Dune: Messiah adaptation as officially happening.

Is such a movie a good idea, however?

First of all let us consider what Dune: Messiah was in the original Dune series--not just a follow-up to Dune, but a prelude to the third book, Children of Dune, which concluded the ultimately tragic story of Paul Atreides and clarified What it All Ultimately Meant for Humanity. Adapting just the second book without any expectation of adapting the third seems rather pointless to me--again, a matter of telling just part of the story. (Indeed it was a very sound decision on the part of the then-SciFi Channel when it filmed the second and third books together as a single six-hour miniseries back in 2003.) And as it happens, no one seems to be talking about that third book--partly, I suppose, because the commentariat DO NOT READ BOOKS, and therefore do not know how incomplete a Dune: Messiah would leave the saga.

One should also consider the source material for such a sequel, and its significant differences with the original Dune. As Josh Varlin made very clear, in adapting the first Dune novel Villeneuve's movie did a lot of violence to the background to the later books--enough so that it will have repercussions for any adaptations of the follow-up, like, to cite only the most obvious issue, the fact that at the end of the first film Chani left Paul. (After all, in the book the triangle between Paul, Irulan and Chani is indispensable to the intrigues directed against Paul--as is Chani's dying but leaving Paul newborn twins who are the protagonists of the third book.) The fact that Alia was unborn at that point in the narrative, and could not play her part in the events of the first novel, with all their resonance for the personality that emerges in her mind in the third; the downplaying of the complex power structure of the Empire that proves so important to the second book's plot--such things, too, work against any easy shift from the Dune movies we know to an adaptation of the second and third books of the series. (I will add that I have a hard time picturing Timothée Chalamet being up to the extraordinary dramatic demands that the radical shifts in Paul's fortunes impose on anyone essaying the part--and for that matter, seeing Jason Momoa keeping Duncan Idaho credible in the far more involved performances any faithful adaptation of the third book would require.)

Perhaps more fundamental, Villeneuve's movie hollowed out all the substance in the interest of giving us a big action movie (especially when handling Part Two). Problematic enough with the first book, the later books offer far less scope for that--all as the books get more philosophical. (As the writer for the Hollywood Reporter said, quoting a review on Amazon, Messiah "is 'a lot of sitting around and talking.'") They also get stranger. (Indeed, Varlin, an admirer of the original novel who in his review of the first part said that if the movie did no more than inspire "more people to read Herbert's Dune, it will have done a small service," characterized the later entries in the Dune series as "basically unreadable, except by the most devoted fans.") To satisfy the requirement of the studios for blockbuster-type material that will please fans of Part Two of Dune (expecting the same action-oriented filmmaking, at least as much as continuity with the established plot), we would probably get something nearly unrecognizable--and almost certainly even more dismaying to purists than what we have seen to date. Perhaps that unrecognizable product will sell tickets to the general audience--which is really all the Dauriats of Hollywood care about--but it is easy to picture the compromises in the end pleasing no one.

Dune's Place in Science Fiction History: A Few Notes

I remember how when I first read Frank Herbert's Dune I was utterly blown away by it--so much so that I had finished the five sequels in a year's time and years later, in spite of reserve toward his son Brian's contributions to the franchise, eagerly read his continuations of the story for two volumes beyond Chapterhouse: Dune (2006's Hunters of Dune and 2007's Sandworms of Dune).

Looking back on Herbert's saga I still respect its accomplishment--but it is not quite the touchstone that it once was for me.

One reason is that I have read a good deal since--including a lot of still earlier work--and seen that a long development of the genre led up to that, what Herbert produced remarkable in many ways, but not so original as it once looked. The galactic scale empire, the cosmic time scale--all this was frankly old hat in 1965, and in some respects others had outdone it long before. (Certainly an Olaf Stapledon's vision had been even wider and broader and more fundamentally idea-packed.) I can add that Dune's protagonist Paul Atreides came to seem just a late expression of the longtime obsession of the genre, and especially the John Campbell crowd (one should remember that that early version of Dune, Dune World, first ran in Campbell's Analog), with the idea of supermen rising above the rest of the species and shifting its destiny, with the eugenics, psychic powers and esoteric training involved in making Paul a superman all familiar elements of that body of work. Indeed, A.E. van Vogt's likewise macro-scale Null-A space operas seemed especially relevant, their protagonist's "cortical-thalamic" training anticipating Paul's training in the techniques of the Bene Gesserit, while what van Vogt called the "famous cortical-thalamic pause" even came to seem the obvious inspiration to the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear. ("'I am now relaxing . . . and all stimuli are making the full circuit of my nervous system . . . Always, I am consciously aware of the stimulus moving up to and through the cortex'" in van Vogt's version; "I will face my fear . . . permit it to pass over and through me" in Herbert's less clinically biomedical and more poetic version.) Even van Vogt's propensity for opening his chapters with epigrams now seemed a precedent for Herbert's own--a more developed, ambitious, artful usage, but one building on that earlier work nonetheless.

I found myself developing a more critical attitude toward some of those old elements, too. The treatment of artificial intelligence here (essentially banning it) struck me as all too much in line with the awkwardness of science fiction writers in the computer age that Vernor Vinge wrote about in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity"--coming to "an opaque wall across the future" and just not dealing with it. There is also that matter of feudalism-in-space--which seemed more suited to pulpy melodramatics of the George Lucas variety than the more serious stuff Herbert aimed at producing, as I increasingly sympathized with Mack Reynolds' being "sick and tired of reading stories based 10,000 years in the future where all the sciences have progressed fabulously except for one," exemplified by how rather than going forward, or even sideways, we just went backward.

The result was that Dune now looks to me as much monument to the genre's prior growth as foundation for later work, indeed maybe more striking in the first way than in the second--and testament to the limits its writers faced even in this comparatively dynamic era for the field.

The Trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux (Joker 2) is Out

As I remarked before I found the 2019 film Joker to have a very interesting premise and display a good deal of ambition, and achieve moments of real bite--but as is all too often the case in contemporary filmmaking its derivativeness and conventionality ultimately got the better of it, leaving us with elements that proved discordant, and undermined the whole. (When you want to say something about reality it is best to avoid playing "reality games" with the audience--and sticking so close to the inspiration of Martin Scorsese seemed to result in exactly that. It also seemed to me a mistake to make Arthur Fleck such a nonentity.) The result was still a worthwhile film, but one which still fell short of its potential.

Of course, the film was a billion dollar hit anyway--which all but guaranteed a sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, which we were told would be a musical. My first thought was that this could see the movie end up New York, New York to its predecessor's Taxi Driver--a big failure following a big hit. Still, I checked out the trailer with interest--and am not sure what to make of it. It gives an impression of a (very) dark and twisted take on that old standard, the romantic comedy musical, with the lovers in question the Joker and Harley Quinn (here not his psychiatrist, but another mental patient at Arkham Asylum). Yet that seems unlikely to be all there is here--especially going by what we have heard about a possible order-of-magnitude ramping up of the violence of the first film, and at the same time, the themes of the first film that caused such a moral panic, namely societal decay, inequality, mental illness, and the confluence of them in monstrosities like the Joker.

Especially reading comparisons to A Clockwork Orange on the part of people who claimed to have seen the script, I suspect we are more likely to see a nihilistic reveling in brutality than any thoughtful attempt at social criticism. That, of course, would be just fine with those who so vocally despised the first movie.

Boxoffice Pro's Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Prediction: Thoughts

Boxoffice Pro has issued its prediction for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes--the fourth movie in the rebooted Planet of the Apes series. The publication's staff anticipate a $40-$50 million opening weekend, and a $100-$140 million overall domestic run for the film.

How do these numbers compare with those its predecessors? Consider the figures for these below (presented with the current dollar grosses of which are outside the parentheses, the adjustment of the figures for March 2024 dollars in them):

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)--$177 million ($244 million)

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014)--$209 million ($274 million)

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)--$147 million ($188 million)

Looking back we can see that the three films were, by summer blockbuster standards, respectable earners, rather than really stellar ones (not one of these movies making its year's top ten in-calendar grossers), while the third film was the low point for the series commercially.* However, that movie's gross was still considerably higher than even the best anticipated for Kingdom, which itself may prove optimistic given this particular film and the market it faces. Coming seven years after the last sequel, and likely seeming unnecessary in the wake of that last film's apparent rounding off a well-received trilogy, extensions of run-down sci-fi franchises are proving a very tough sell these days (the story of 2023).

Still, let us for the moment accept the $100-$140 million figure for now, and put it into a bigger context as part of a bigger worldwide gross. Looking over the international numbers I am struck by how China was an important market for the latter two films (which more than doubled their domestic gross internationally with the help of $100 million+ worth of ticket sales in that country). China being less likely to help out so much this time, I think it safe to guess at a global gross divided more like that of the first film (with the domestic take closer to 40 than 30 percent). That being the case one might anticipate a gross under $450 million, and more likely in the range of $250-$400 million.

At the same time, if the production cost anything like that for the prior two films ($150 million+, before inflation), we could be looking at, between the cost of the production, and the added costs, an outlay of $400-$600 million, necessitating a gross of $500 million+ to get the movie to the break-even point in a relatively optimistic scenario.

The gap between that break-even point, and the likely cost, is such that even a much smaller outlay by the backers than is suggested here may still exceed the film's likely take.**

The result is that it is easy to picture this movie--arguably reflecting the pre-pandemic and pre-2023 logic rather than the thinking demanded by the present situation--losing its backer a good deal of money, perhaps a lot of it. Still, I suspect that just as has been the case in 2023 competition for a place on Deadline's list of the year's biggest flops will prove very stiff indeed, such that I would not rush just yet to claim a spot for it in the list's upper ranks. (For instance, have you heard about this Gladiator 2?)

* The 2011 and 2014 films made only the #11 spot, the 2017 film the 22nd position.
** This is based on usage of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index indicating that $150 million+ in 2014-2017 approximately equal $200 million in early 2024 prices; and, in line with my previously discussed premises, the likelihood that the full expenditure on the film will be 2-3 times the net production budget, the movie need to make up a rough 60 percent of its cost at the box office, and the studios keeping about half the box office gross.

Gladiator 2: What Are its Chances of Profitability?

The release of a new trailer for Gladiator 2 has, of course, caused a spike in chatter about the film--overwhelmingly enthusiastic, to go by what I have seen. The critical and commercial failure that was Ridley Scott's prior historical epic, Napoleon (and the fact that Napoleon's failure has been the norm for Scott's epics) seems utterly absent from the dialogue as instead the commentators, befitting their function as les claqueurs, fixate on Scott's one real "win" in the form with 2000's Gladiator--while overlooking any problems with the concept of a follow-up, which seem quite evident in the trailer they are celebrating. The movie, a sequel to a movie where both the hero and the villain died, and which presumably made what followed an "alternate history" given its extreme remoteness from the facts (the Roman Republic restored!), looks less like follow-up than do-over of the first, scaled-up and disguised as a sequel, with (per usual for Scott) the spectacle coming in far, far ahead of anything else for all the melodramatic implications of the bits of dialogue, the blaring music.

In fairness I think more people will show up for this one than did for Scott's "vision" of Napoleon as Arthur Fleck in period costume. But will enough of them show to justify the colossal expenditure on this movie?

As might be expected these days amid pandemic, inflation, elevated interest rates, strikes and much else Gladiator 2 is a movie that was massively budgeted to begin with and then went way overbudget--its cost of production nearly doubling from the original $165 million to the $310 million spent. We are told by journalists claiming access to "insiders" that the "net" cost of production was actually $250 million, but even if true (and the studios have been known to underreport costs here) that is still quite a bit of money--and just part of the total final bill. After all, counting promotion and distribution and other such expenses the ultimate outlay for a movie comes to two to three times the cost of production (certainly when we take into account post-theatrical promotion and distribution for home viewing, etc.). Working with the $250-$310 million range, this works out to somewhere between $500 million and $900 million or so.

Given the limits of post-theatrical earnings at least 60 percent of that will have to be made from ticket sales--which is to say, $300 to $550 million. Given that the studio typically keeps a bit less than half of the proceeds from the ticket sales one would have to picture a gross double that--somewhere between $600 million and $1.1 billion grossed just to get the production past break-even.

As it happened the first Gladiator made $460 million back in 2000--which works out to about $840 million in today's terms, or the mid-point of that range. That in itself is cause for concern, as it means the movie can do as well, or better than, its hugely successful predecessor, and still lose money. Exacerbating the problem is that such money is not so easily made now as it was just a few years ago, with sequels offering splashy spectacle in particular a tougher sell than before--and this specific movie a particularly unnecessary-looking sequel that, because of the plot of the first film, does not have the original's stars, appearing almost a quarter of a century after that first film. I do not think the public's interest can be taken for granted, while interest among the younger cohort, for which period pieces are a particularly tough sell, will be something to watch closely, along with the matter of just how spendthrift the film's backers and makers have been. My gut reaction is that if all it takes to get into the territory of profitability is $600 million (almost a third less than what the original made) this movie may have a tough time achieving that, but that it would be doable. By contrast the billion dollar, let alone the $1.1 billion, mark (far above the original's gross, and perhaps more than any movie may make this year according to at least one analyst) seems like a real longshot.

What a Difference a Year Makes: Anticipating the Summer 2024 Movie Season

At the outset of 2023 I predicted the normalization of the box office on the basis of the combination of the prior year's evidences of the revival of North American moviegoers' readiness to go to the theater (seen in how the Spider-Man, Top Gun and Avatar sequels took in over $2 billion between them) with the first pre-pandemic style slate of would-be blockbusters since 2019.

Things did not go that way. Rather than the box office recovering from the 54 percent of the (real, inflation-adjusted) pre-pandemic 2015-2019 norm that it was in 2022 to 100 percent of that norm, or 90 percent of that norm, or 80 percent, or even 70 percent, 2023 saw the box office take a mere 64 percent of the 2015-2019 average in ticket sales. Yes, the year was packed with "big movies" in a way not seen in years, but moviegoers shunned most of them, resulting in a year crowded with costly flops, and the year's combined take only marginally higher than before--even with the help of that handful of less conventional successes that beat the expectations for them (The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the animated Spider-Man, Barbie, Oppenheimer, and to a lesser degree a few others like the Taylor Swift concert movie), without which the 2023 box office would have probably seen a decline from 2022.

One can argue for various factors at work here. Perhaps the pandemic has permanently reduced North Americans' relatively high propensity for moviegoing (reducing their 4 trips to the theater per year, if not quite to the 1-2 seen in Germany and Japan, perhaps to 2-3 a year). Perhaps the public has, in the way long expected by some, lost its tolerance for endless sequels and prequels and reboots of the same handful of increasingly long-ago hits from a very few different genres--or at least one of those genres ("superhero fatigue" kicking in). However, there is nothing to make anyone think those factors will not matter to 2024, which has the further disadvantage of many of its potentially biggest movies having been bumped to 2025 by the strikes of last year.

This especially seems something to think about as summer approacheth. Back at this time last year people were speculating about the possibility of Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and The Flash being billion dollar hits, about how well Indiana Jones 5 would do, how Disney's live-action remake of The Little Mermaid might restore some of the studio's lost luster, how good will toward Tom Cruise for Top Gun 2 might bolster the fortunes of the latest Mission: Impossible film, etc., etc..

Alas, it did not go the way they thought it would, while even by pre-pandemic standards this summer would not have looked very strong. Yes, there are lots of big sequels--but not a lot of likely record-breaking, billion dollar barrier-blasting first-stringers. The season opens not with Marvel's superheroes--but with an adaptation of The Fall Guy promising the weakest opening for a summer kick-off movie since 2005. After that we have a continuation of the Planet of the Apes reboot that seems an unnecessary addition to a series past its commercial peak, and Mad Max (sequel to a movie more critical darling than box office record-breaker), Twister 2 (following up a movie from 1996!), an adaptation of the Borderlands video game by Eli Roth, yet another Alien prequel (groan), more Bad Boys and more Deadpool, and at the very end of the season, two more superhero films, namely a Crow remake (a relatively low-budgeted remake of a mere cult hit from three decades ago), and another installment in the Sony Spider-Man Universe (you know, the one that brought you Morbius and Madame Web) in Kraven the Hunter. The animated offerings may be a little stronger, with Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 on the way, but I think in each case the studio is pushing its luck, all as, if a Barbie-style hit is necessarily a surprise, I see not the least little hint of any of the other movies on the schedule becoming such a success. The result is that I would not be shocked if the summer of 2024 saw its grosses consistently run below those of 2023 all the way through the season, from a May that seems bound to compare poorly with the preceding one that delivered Guardians of the Galaxy 3, Fast and Furious 10 and The Little Mermaid (for all their individual and collective underperformance), to August (when the movies by Nolan and Gerwig were raking in the cash and saving the studios).

David Walsh Takes on the O.J. Simpson Trial

Three decades ago David Walsh wrote about the O.J. Simpson trial. As one might expect of him, he did not neglect what the extreme attention to the event indicated about American society--the idiotic worship of wealth and the "success" that is the euphemism for it, the cult of celebrity, the disconnect of the content of the media from real life, the evasion of pressing world problems, the disorientation of much of the public. However, one of those pieces seem to me particularly worth mentioning as an antidote to the nonsense about how the country was "captivated" by those events of which we are now getting so much. As Walsh observed, "[t]he absorption with these events is largely created or at least manipulated by the media," all as the media endeavors "to implicate the public in the" essential depravity of that absorption--claiming that it is the public's obsession that is keeping the media "fixated on the Simpson trial" in a crisis-ridden world. While the real driver was "the element of calculation" on the media's part, using the "case . . . as a black hole sucking popular attention away from the potentially explosive" world situation--just as it had so many other similar cases before in those years of tabloid inanity as the dominant feature of the evening news (Amy Fisher, Tonya Harding, etc., etc.).

For his part Walsh suggested that "the effort to keep the public absorbed by 'real-life' melodrama is doomed to fail," with "the Simpson case . . . perhaps the last gasp of this sort of mindlessness." Alas, if it can seem that no really comparable trial has had quite the same hold on the mediasphere since, the tabloid mentality nevertheless prevailed, infecting political life ever since, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton a signal moment in that process, as more broadly the media, news media included, has never stopped trying to keep the public absorbed by "'real-life' melodrama," with the process growing so intense and absurd and grotesque as to make the depravity of the '90s look arcadian by comparison with where American culture stands today.

Remembering the Coverage of the O.J. Simpson Trial

The NBC headline regarding O.J. Simpsons' death ran "O.J. Simpson, former NFL star whose trial captivated the country, dies of cancer at 76."

NBC is not alone in reporting the matter as such, the use of the term "captivated" a cliché of the current coverage, to be found in reporting of Mr. Simpson's death by outlets as varied as, besides fellow network news operations like ABC and CBS, the more staid newscast on PBS, newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to USA Today, and of course, entertainment publications such as The Hollywood Reporter.

My recollection of the actual events, which I trust infinitely more than I do NBC, and all those previously named outlets combined, is not of the Simpson trial "captivating" the country, but its being mercilessly inflicted on it by the lowest common denominator, hot button-pushing, tabloid trash-peddling scum of the mainstream media that people quite remote from reality admonish us for not respecting as the sole valid source of information about current events. The public was indeed captive--but not to its supposed fascination with the trial, rather to the priorities of those occupying that media's commanding heights, who contrary to those who may hope that the media have "learned something" since that fracas, have done little but disgrace themselves instead, as a glance at the headlines on our news pages shows--not only because of the manner in which they report the news, but the hard reality that the way they report it has left the world worse off, contributing to the consistently horrifying character of those headlines.

Looking Back: Stanley Kubrick's Answers the Charge of Fascism in the New York Times

When A Clockwork Orange hit theaters the movie was controversial not simply for its violent content, but for its perceived politics, with those of liberal opinions commonly regarding it as a very right-wing movie (in Roger Ebert's words, "a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning")--and the New York Times education editor Fred Hechinger saying that "an alert liberal . . . should recognize the voice of fascism" in it.*

A Clockwork Orange director Stanley Kubrick took great exception to that the charge of fascism, and was given the opportunity to offer his response in the pages of the Times itself. Kubrick's counter-argument stressed Hechinger's not supporting his claim about the movie initially, and that others had understood the film differently, citing the views of not just Clockwork Orange writer Anthony Burgess but Catholic News film critic John Fitzgerald of the film as a "Christian sermon" about free will and what its lack would mean. Of course, he did not clearly endorse their view, but he did go on to a more substantive counter-argument--in which he repeated the very opinions that Hechinger quoted in criticism of Kubrick (reiterating his own anti-Rousseau, anti-Enlightenment anti-humanistic, Robert Ardrey's ethology-influenced pessimism, acknowledging his anti-liberalism), but denied that these were fascist opinions.

Kubrick is quite prolix in that denial--but never offers a definition of fascism, a standard for what would constitute fascism, such that one could distinguish his, or anyone else's, views from it. The result is that those inclining toward sympathy for Kubrick's denial might be impressed by his defense--but those taking a more critical attitude toward Kubrick's position, especially seeing Kubrick double down at length on the hard right position he had already taken, probably came away thinking that Kubrick had failed to refute Hechinger's reading, and indeed validated it in respects, the more in as those on the left have come to expect to be attacked for merely using the "F" word whether they do so correctly or not.

* Ebert said of the film (in what is filmically an exceptionally literate review that discusses the cinematography, music, etc. in detail) that while "[i]t pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control . . . all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex," with which nastiness it endeavors to make the reviewer identify--all in imparting its philosophical-political message about human vileness and the hopelessness one must accordingly accept.

Revisiting the Philosophical Controversy Over Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange

When Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange hit theaters the movie was instantly and significantly controversial--not only for its brutal violence, but because of its politics, and in a way that seems of particular interest today. Where today it is standard to equate "liberal" and "conservative," "left" and "right" with grab-bags of opinions about laundry lists of hot button issues, the argument over Kubrick's movie addressed what these words have traditionally meant to the politically literate--stances toward that fundamental question of political philosophy since the Enlightenment, namely the nature of human beings, what this means for the possibilities for society's shape, and especially whether or not reason can be used to bring about a freer, more equal, more just, more flourishing order of things. It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that A Clockwork Orange, true to Anthony Burgess' source material, espoused a deeply pessimistic view of the matter identifiable not with the Enlightenment's liberalism, but the Counter-Enlightenment's anti-liberalism--the right, indeed the hard right, rather than the left, with this today bolstered by Kubrick's consistent, explicit, political statements at the time (in two interview-based pieces in the New York Times, and then again in a piece in the pages of that same publication). Moreover, at the time liberals called out the film as such--as a right-wing and even fascist movie (with it seeming significant that while Kubrick denied the film was fascist, he reiterated what would be conventionally taken as very right-wing views).*

Where the lack of comparable controversy over a piece of pop culture in a long time is concerned, it seems to me that besides the decline of the political literacy that made such argument possible there has been, essentially, a triumph of deeply conservative views among the mainstream commentariat--even those members of it who would not identify as conservative. In the view of a great many observers, David Walsh has remarked, "realism" has come to mean "presenting humanity in the dimmest possible light," with filmmakers endeavoring to "outdo each other . . . in their depictions of people’s depravity and sadism," not least by "sticking in all the sordid details one can think of," while far from being "indignant" at the state of the world, they show "a warm, almost grateful acceptance of the filthiness" that they hold to come "from the rottenness of humanity itself"--often, I would add, in a tone of self-satisfied, trollish, "Welcome to the real world!" swagger. They have thus come to take the kind of politics A Clockwork Orange presented in stride, as unworthy of remark, as mere conventional wisdom, with any other outlook so "dated" or otherwise out of touch with "reality" as to not be worth answering--a result not just the right but the political Center fought to achieve.

* Indeed, the film's star Malcolm McDowell remarked in an interview liberal dislike of the film. Sounding like what would today be called a troll ("Liberals, they hate Clockwork because they're dreamers and it shows them realities . . . Cringe, don't they, when faced with the bloody truth?" which was that "People are basically bad, corrupt," as he had "always sensed") McDowell claimed later in a letter to the Times that his remark was not "gleeful" but "despondent" (odd as that may seem to one who reads the whole interview, and little as this actually changes).

"Welcome to the Real World!"

The phase "Welcome to the real world!" is notoriously uttered with condescension and outright Schadenfreude in response to someone else being unpleasantly disillusioned, or more deeply pained, by contact with the supposed "real world."

Few ask what they mean by "real" here. Alas, in line with the standard of "realism" David Walsh describes as what the conventional have in mind, it means "presenting humanity in the dimmest possible light"--what is revolting, the "real," and all else somehow not real. Society as a Hobbesian state of nature on steroids, with anything else "fake," to be believed in only by the contemptibly naive.

Some grasp of reality, that--and all too much in line with the stupid swagger and general nastiness of the phrases that do so much to befoul spoken and written English in our time.

The Politics of Stanley Kubrick--and of A Clockwork Orange

It is very common for those discussing works of art and their creators to flub the characterization of their politics at their most basic level. Sometimes this is because the works and creators are genuinely complexly multi-sided, uncertain, drawn in different directions at once. However, it seems to me more common for them to get such things wrong because they are simply political illiterates--with this compounded by the way that some never miss a chance to confuse the issue.

One such case is Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange. Interviewed in the New York Times by Bernard Weinraub and Craig McGregor in January 1972 Kubrick attacked as "[o]ne of the most dangerous fallacies" of politics and philosophy "that man is essentially good, and that it is society which makes him bad." He specifically singled out the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau for criticism here, saying that "[m]an isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage . . . irrational, brutal . . . unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved . . . violent," while specifically criticizing Rousseau's "transferr[ing] original sin from man to society"--his view of man as good and society as corrupting--as having led to that fallacy, "creat[ing] social institutions" on which basis "is probably doomed to failure."

No one the least bit conversant in political philosophy should find these statements to be ambiguous in their political content. Here Kubrick zeroed in on the fundamental issue in modern political philosophy--the nature of human beings and their societies and what this means for attempts to bring about a more humane and justice order--and clearly took one side. Where the liberal-radical Enlightenment held humans to be rational, the conservative Counter-Enlightenment (the tradition of Burke, de Maistre et. al.) held humans to be irrational. Where the rationalistic and secular Enlightenment rejected talk of original sin, the Counter-Enlightenment regarded it as fundamental to its view of human irrationality, and human badness, which they held shut the door on all hope of "social institutions" that would be more free, more equal, more just, more humane than those existing. In his remarks Kubrick explicitly took the side of the conservative Counter-Enlightenment here (without even trying to dress it up in the "psychologism" that had become so fashionable by his time), underlined his stance with his criticism of Rousseau by name--and indeed, while expounding upon how "many aspects of liberal mythology are coming to grief now" was alert that he was "going to sound like William Buckley" (emphasis added).* The apparent inclination of Kubrick to a view of humans as "risen apes," specifically based on the work of the deeply pessimistic science writer Robert Ardrey, his combination of his pessimistic view of humans and human reason with a quasi-religious "hope" nin the thought of "God-like" "intelligence . . . outside the earth"--both of which aspects of his thinking could seem on pointed display in his preceding 2001: A Space Odyssey--would seem to complement, if not affirm, rather than contradict the view of Kubrick as deeply right-wing in his views. So too what his film seemed to say about welfare states, socialism, therapy as an alternative to "law and order" policies as a way of dealing with crime, Russian cultural influence, and much else.

Granted, Kubrick's career was a long and unusual one, and it seems plausible that there were shifts in his thinking and feeling through it. (It may seem difficult to reconcile Kubrick's statements here with the deeply humane and ferociously critical sensibility of his World War I film Paths of Glory, for example. Indeed, David Walsh has read Kubrick's career as, after the initial display of a "humanitarian impulse" going by that film, "a slow descent into the slough of misanthropy followed by, if not a climb out of it, at least a playing about on its far bank," with Kubrick "seeming to touch bottom" in A Clockwork Orange.) It seems plausible, too, that his outlook had its idiosyncrasies, that if philosophically very much of the right he may still have felt less than fully at home on the "actually existing" right per se. (Why should a right-winger be abashed about sounding like William Buckley?) Still, given what he himself said about his view of the world at the time it seems no oddity but quite natural that Kubrick was attracted to the idea of adapting a novel by a T.S. Eliot-influenced writer of similar religious-monarchical sympathies who rubbed this dark view of humanity in his reader's faces (to which work Kubrick admitted "respond[ing] emotionally . . . very intensely")--just as Kubrick was attracted a little while before to the work of another right-wing writer who had made a stir with material that, going by what Nabokov said about his own intentions, he had intended to provoke (Vladimir Nabokov)--and that Kubrick was well aware of what he was presenting as an artist, what his film was saying about humans and society. By the same token it seems that those who, like Roger Ebert and Fred Hechinger, recognized a very right-wing work at the time--part of a stream of right-wing work in Hechinger's view that was as much a part of the history of the New Hollywood as more left-wing fare--were quite correct to do so, whatever else one may say about any other rights or wrongs on the part of any of those involved.

* William Buckley, founder of the National Review, was of course a pillar of post-war conservatism in America.

Boxoffice Pro's Opening Weekend Projection for The Fall Guy

As you might recall I was fairly dubious about the idea of a Fall Guy movie--for many reasons. Still, it seems that the claquing for this one will be very loud. (Following the movie's debut at the SXSW festival the critics were raving, reflecting which response it has had an 89 percent critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes.)

And I wondered how much it would matter. If, indeed, I could not be as far off the mark in judging this film's prospects as I was in judging those of Top Gun 2.

Alas, it does not look that way. Boxoffice Pro has put out its first forecast for The Fall Guy--which anticipates a mere $20-$40 million for the opening weekend. Even with its expectation of surprisingly good legs (the movie managing to make between three and four times the range of its opening weekend gross with a domestic run) that only leads to a final take of $75-$125 million.

For a low-budget film released in a quiet part of the year that would be decent. For a $125 million production budgeted release supposed to launch the summer season it is . . . not.

Let us consider the formula I discussed last year, that the full expense entailed in the movie's making and release was two to three times the reported production budget (counting in promotion, distribution, claims from residuals whose full weight will only become clear later, etc.), which works out to a figure of $250-$375 million. Very likely 60 percent of that has to be made at the box office ($150-$225 million, netted), and the studio gets at best 50 percent of the box office gross, which works to a plausible estimate of a global gross of at least $300 million (and perhaps much more) before the movie begins to look profitable. Even at the high end of the range predicted by Boxoffice Pro the movie would have to do very, very well abroad to hit that mark (making 1.5 times its domestic take abroad)--and it is very easy to see it falling short of it, especially with the international markets no more reliable than the domestic one these days, and of course, this relatively marginal opener facing competition from such movies as the new installments in the rebooted Planet of the Apes and Mad Max franchises in the weeks after Fall Guy's release. Both those movies, too, are facing a tougher market than they did at the time of their franchise's prior releases, but the point is that it may not take much to crowd out the Ryan Gosling vehicle--especially in the wake of what will likely be the weakest summer launch in nearly two decades (when Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven opened to $20 million in 2005, some $32 million in today's terms).

Of course, there is still a month to go before the movie's debut--and like Barbie this Ryan Gosling vehicle might see surging interest prior to release. But such changes of prospect are, of course, a rarity, and this the situation as it stands now--though box office-watchers may find it interesting to pay attention to the revisions in expectations between now and May 3.

Our First Non-Superhero Summer Movie Season Kickoff Since 2006

Surveying those films that launched the hugely important summer movie season over the course of the twenty-first century one finds that it is not only the case that nearly every first weekend of that season since 2008 has been launched by a Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film (beginning with that year's Iron Man), with this the case for each and every proper summer season since 2015.* It is also the case that since 2002 just about every summer movie season was launched by a Marvel superhero epic--with the Spider-Man (2002, 2004, 2007) and X-Men (2003) movies arrived before the MCU came along, and filling in the gaps in most of those rare years after Iron Man when there was no MCU film scheduled for that weekend (2009, 2014).**

It was an extraordinary run testifying to the extraordinary popularity not just of the MCU, but the broader Marvel brand, and the superhero film generally.

Of course, 2024 will not be seeing an MCU, or any Marvel or even superhero, release on the first weekend of summer. Instead the season will open with . . . The Fall Guy.

This may seem just a blip. After all, Captain America 4 was supposed to open that critical first weekend, but this was made impossible by last year's double-strike by Hollywood's actors and writers. However, it is also the case that the MCU, and the superhero genre more broadly, have had a very rough year and a half at this point, with Marvel's Phase Four clearly troubled by the time of Thor 4 (from which point on sequels were making 20 to 50 percent less in real terms than the films which preceded them), and Captain Marvel 2 proved a catastrophe, its global gross ultimately a mere 15 percent that of the original. As the situation stands, Disney-Marvel may still plan to have The Thunderbolts, at least, out on May 2, 2025, and may still succeed in doing that--but barring a turnaround in the fortunes of the franchise and the genre the results will only testify to the passing of their old market dominance.

* The films are, respectively, Iron Man) (2008) and its two sequels (2010, 2013), the first Thor movie (2011), the third Captain America movie (2016), the four Avengers films (2012, 2015, 2018, 2019), the second and third Guardians of the Galaxy movies (2017, 2023), and Dr. Strange 2 (2022). (Where the exceptional 2020-2021 period is concerned it is worth remembering that Black Widow was scheduled for the first weekend of May 2020, and delayed only by the pandemic, which had a sufficiently distorting effect on the summer of 2021 that the author of this post also does not count it as a "proper" summer.)
** The films in question were X-Men: Wolverine in 2009 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014. The sole years in which this did not occur were 2005 and 2006 (kicked off by Ridley Scott's historical epic Kingdom of Heaven, and Mission: Impossible III, respectively, both significant disappointments that ultimately underlined just how important the superhero film was to become in this period).

Checking in with Madame Web

Madame Web came out over Valentine's/President's Day weekend to a very weak, if not really worse than expected, audience response.

How do things stand now?

The film, which was in 27th place at the box office on the weekend of March 22-24, finished up well short of the $50 million mark domestically (under $44 million actually), and did not do much better internationally--pulling in just under $56 million there, to leave its global total a bit below $100 million at last report from Box Office Mojo. It is not inconceivable that the movie will somehow make the remaining $800,000 or so to break the $100 million barrier, and thus technically be a "$100 million hit," but that just does not mean what it used to--especially for a franchise superhero film, and at that, one from the Spider-Man universe.

One may add to this that the film's audience scores are 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.6 on Internet Movie Data Base.

The result is that in contrast with those role films that manage to triumph over a poor start (like last year's Elemental), this movie's flop status still stands--and shows every sign of continuing to stand, with all that implies for any schemes for spinning off other movies from this one, the Sony Spider-Man Universe that already took a hit rather than scored one with 2022's Morbius, every other scheme for squeezing more money out of audiences through the use of less well-known superheroes in lower-key films, and the superhero genre generally, though of course, a good many such efforts are doubtless locked in, and the fact remains that Hollywood has no plans for what to do with itself as its longstanding model of filmmaking becomes untenable. Except, perhaps, to bet on mighty Artificial Intelligences somehow coming to its rescue, the same as the rest of the business community these days (no matter how much certain billionaires would have us believe otherwise as they flog silly Frankenstein complex stuff on TV).