How Did The Fall Guy Do in the End?

This past weekend The Fall Guy hit theaters. It ended up making a bit under $28 million--under the bottom end of the range projected by Boxoffice Pro, and well under the $35 million that seems to have been conventionally projected for it.

That is to say it performed below even the very low expectations held for the film--with the result that the movie was not only outgrossed by 2005's Kingdom of Heaven, but by every first weekend of May release going back to the 1990s, back when the blockbuster season properly began only a little later. (Consider, for instance, how things stood in 1998, when the first real summer release was Deep Impact--which appeared the second weekend in May, and collected $41 million then, as that first weekend of May was left to a Spike Lee movie.*)

Of course, one can counter that the film's being given this release date was not quite what was never Plan A, that this would never have happened but for last year's strikes, that it is unfair to judge it by big summer movie standards. (Indeed, as Anthony D'Alessandro remarked, "it's a movie you find either in August, the second weekend of June or even the off season, which is where this was originally scheduled on March 1.") However, no one forced the studio to opt for that release date--they had plenty of other choices over the course of this so far very weak year, while one can add that the Ryan "Kenough" Gosling hype may have conduced to more optimism than was warranted. Moreover the money they sank into it (which has had some analysts scratching their heads) is not dump month money but summer month money, such that the studio hoped the prime stretch of year in which it launched it would give the studio a better chance of recouping a considerable investment than otherwise.

Alas, the movie will have to have a lot of staying power at the box office to do that--enjoy very good week-to-week holds again and again. Where this is concerned the fact that those bothering to show seem to like it (the audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 87 percent, not rapturous but not bad), and the weakness of the competition in coming weeks, may make this a possibility. Still, it is an inauspicious opening for the movie--and for the summer season that was so thinned out as to make this one look like it "coulda been a contender," and as yet all too likely to end up looking like 2023 would have, minus its eleventh hour rescue by Barbie and Oppenheimer.

* Of course, that $41 million is, before inflation, about 50 percent more than The Fall Guy picked up, and adjusted for 2024 dollars $79 million, or almost three times as much.

Centrism and the Mainstream News Media's Complete Incapacity for Substantive Self-Criticism

A couple of years ago I took up the issue of "media bias", and identified six traits of the mainstream news media's modus operandi that seemed to me to be caused, or at least rationalized, by its centrist political tendency, namely:

1. A tendency to deluge audiences with disconnected and uncontextualized bits of information.

2. A tendency to treat experts, and especially "Establishment" experts, as authorities, and make a reliance on their judgments the alternative to coping with the disconnected bits of information.

3. A deference to--and promotion of--Establishment sources, experts and figures generally (and disregard of those who are not), translating to a deference to Establishment opinions (and disregard of other views).

4. The drawing of the boundaries of the acceptable spectrum of political opinion so that they extend much further to the right of center than they do to the left of center.

5. A tendency to "both sidesism" within the above parameters over striving for the truth about a contentious matter.

6. An emphasis on politics over policy.

One may debate whether the tendencies above really are problematic. Certainly from the standpoint of centrist ideology they are not wrong. That the news media gives audiences disconnected bits of information, or Establishment expert opinions, rather than endeavoring to explain the issues to them; that it is more prone to provide a platform to the right than the left, and to treat many a subject as a "both sides" matter; that it devotes so much attention to politics over policy; can, from the standpoint of a centrist deeply pessimistic about the public's capacity to understand complex issues; deferential to Established expertise and its judgments as the sole alternative to being overwhelmed by a confusing reality; viewing the right as legitimate but the left as not on the grounds that they are "ideologues"; and stressing the formation of consensus rather than truth-seeking, and on the political process rather than the ends they treat as generally and appropriately only small adjustments; as quite appropriate.

However, not all will agree with that judgment--that the media has a responsibility to attempt to explain the issues to the public, the more in as there is no understanding of democracy which does not require that the public be given the opportunity to educate itself and make informed decisions about the matters set before it--the more in as Authority has been an imperfect guide in the past, wrong again and again. (Just consider, for instance, how Authority said that a financial crisis like 2007 was impossible; and then when it did happen said "No one could have seen it coming"; and then after the impossible and unforeseeable happened said that the world got over it quickly, when in fact, as Adam Tooze realized, the crisis "broke the world," and we have been living with the aftermath ever since; Authority was wrong, disastrously wrong, at every turn.)

However, within the media respect for authority prevails, with the result that those who are authorities can never be held to account for being wrong, and command the same respect as ever they did as a result, while those who do not enjoy standing as authorities can never be given credit for being right when they were right, period, such that they can never win a way into the conversation. According to the same logic the media has not been wrong in covering these matters in the manner that it has, those among the public questioning it are instead the ones who are wrong from the centrist's standpoint--while the media's feeble shows of self-criticism when the undesirability of what it is doing appears undeniable only underscore this in such self-criticism generally ending in a declaration that someone else was really at fault. (Thus, as Hiram Lee noted, amid its breathless coverage of O.J. Simpson the talking heads "occasionally pose the question 'Why are we so interested in O.J. Simpson?'"--blaming the public for "forcing" them to attend to tabloid idiocies when the reality was the other way around.)

Given what in the view of anyone not blinded by its ideology are the news media's colossal failings it seems less implausible that those discontented with the quality of the news coverage available to them should look beyond the most mainstream sources--to which course of action the media, in line with all that brought everyone to this point, respond not by endeavoring to do better, but by screaming for the gatekeepers. Ironically, the mess that the Internet is means that the alternatives people are most likely to find are the ones that the mainstream media itself has promoted in ways from abundant mention of them in its coverage to mainstreaming their views and even their personalities, even as they put on a big show of criticizing them and all they do, the Establishment media never worrying about their massive role in the relentless manufacture of "fake news" in which we are all drowning.

The "Americanness" of the Superhero: A Few Thoughts

As any decent history of the superhero will tell you--not just the superhero in a broad sense going back to Gilgamesh but the comic book-based superhero tradition defined by Superman, the concept of the superhero has not been exclusively American, nor without its popularity outside the United States. (Indeed, just consider how much Marvel owes to the international markets, with these providing 69 percent of the nearly $3 billion gross of Avengers: Endgame.)

Still, it is common for observers to remark the idea of the superhero--the costumed, public persona-possessing comic book superhero--as having struck a particular chord in the United States, to somehow appeal more widely and deeply here than in many other places. I can think of at least two reasons for that, both suggested by my reading of Umberto Eco's essay "The Myth of Superman" (which I previously discussed here):

1. In the aforementioned essay Umberto Eco treated Superman as a myth--while noting that this myth differs from other myth in being a myth of the present-day rather than the past. The idea of a present-day myth seems to me to befit a country that, as the clichés have had it, has always been less preoccupied with the past than other countries, and more preoccupied with the present and future.

2. The attraction of the superhero is for many a sort of vicarious grandiose compensation for the mediocrity, inferiority, frustration that characterize the lot of most in this world, for many reasons. Of course, the desire for such compensation is universal, but again, in a society so atomized, individualistic, unequal, restless, insecure; so saturated with aspirationalism and thwarted aspirationalism and blame and self-blame of the thwarted for what they suffer; and offering so little else to hope for, ever fixing their eyes ever on individual "success," ever encouraging identification with such success and those who have it in that way that C. Wright Mills wrote about in White Collar; the desire, and the superhero as a way of gratifying it, seems likely to be the stronger. Indeed, if it is really the case that poor Americans see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," this is probably an easier sell--habituating people to the thought that they are exemplary in some way temporarily unrecognized by others, as if the real them is some more glamorous self behind the mundane surface and its unenviable treatment by others, or that the transformation of their situation is somehow always very close at hand, that they are ever just a radioactive spider bite away from greatness.*

* In light of inflation we should probably revise that to "temporarily embarrassed billionaires." I put the reader on notice that that is the form I will use from here on out.

A Closer Look at How Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Did in Deadline's 2023 Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament

Previously when speculating about the outcome of Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament this year I guessed that Oppenheimer would make the top five--and indeed it did, making exactly the #5 position.

How did the economics of that work out? Deadline reports that the production cost $100 million. But, as is the case when a movie does really well, participations and residuals were hefty--making the eventual outlay over five times that. At the same time the revenue from ticket sales was lower than one might have thought given the near billion-dollar gross, just $422 million (43 percent of the worldwide gross, where often it approaches 50 percent). This may have been a function of the high share of international sales (the movie did two-thirds of its business internationally, which has been known to skew the cut downwards), and the film's "legs" (the usual arrangement with leggy movies being the studio keeping less and less of the take in return for theaters running the movie longer). All the same, if the participations and residuals took a big bite out of revenue that might have been a bit lower than one might have guessed from the gross, it still worked out to an over $200 million net on the production, an extraordinary sum for a film such as this one.

Martin Caidin's Steve Austin, and TV's

In adapting Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man was rather more faithful to the original material than I had guessed before picking up the first of those books. Steve Austin's accident as a test pilot of a prototype shuttle; his physical reconstruction with all its mental as well as physical agonies; his promptly being packed off on missions to South America and the Middle East--we see all this in the TV movies, with most of the modifications probably understandable given censorship, budgetary constraints and the like. However, some were clearly more deliberate choices, not least the reimagining of Austin himself. Caidin, who could be very much the edgelord, had a fondness for extremely unlikeable protagonists--and while Austin is no Doug Stavers-like supervillain, the runners of the show took it on themselves to considerably humanize him. Given that the intent was a weekly TV series people could enjoy as easy viewing it seems to me that it was a sound decision--one that has probably helped to give the show its extremely long life in reruns.

Remembering The Six Million Dollar Man

One of the ironies of there being a Fall Guy movie is that we had for so long heard about a movie based on Lee Major's other, more successful, TV series The Six Million Dollar Man being in the works--but as yet to no result.

That show was an adaptation of Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels--initially as a trio of made-for-TV movies, and then a weekly series that ran for 99 additional one-hour episodes over five seasons, while launching a successful spin-off in The Bionic Woman, both of which can be credited with lingering in pop cultural memory to a far greater degree than The Fall Guy did. (I remember how those reruns were a staple of what became the Syfy Channel back in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they still seem to get a fair amount of play on the classic TV-oriented broadcast and streaming channels, while The Bionic Woman got a short-lived remake on NBC starring Michelle Ryan in the lead back in '08.)

Of course, even if it was being talked about in Hollywood offices the idea only became increasingly implausible. The salability of classic TV show-based feature films has only declined since the '90s, for many reasons, while in this case even the title came to seem dated, not least due to inflation, above all in the medical realm. (The Social Security Part B premium was $6.30 back in 1973; it is $174.70 this year, a 28-fold surge over the last half century. And never mind that the New York Times will tell us "Don't worry. Be happy" regarding the skyrocketing of prices.) Given that no one is becoming a Steve Austin-type cyborg on the basis of six million dollars even the title of the show and its associated brand name recognition would have to be dispensed with--which is all that the kind of people who run the studios really care about in the end.

Martin Caidin's Cyborg as Proto-Techno-Thriller

Researching the military techno-thriller for my book on the subject a few years ago, specifically looking for the linkages between those old invasion stories of the pre-World War I era and the age of Tom Clancy, I found plenty of connecting threads--works across various genres that retained some of the old elements of the invasion story that, developed by later writers, led back to it. Thus by the early 1970s we were starting to get a good many books that look fairly close to the '80s-era thrillers of this type, with many of the elements, but arguably not quite all the way there, with a good example Martin Caidin's Cyborg--the novel on which Kenneth Johnson based The Six Million Dollar Man series.

Cyborg's military-espionage, technological and geopolitical themes, and its action-adventure-oriented and action-packed treatment of them, not least in its technically detailed flying sequences, are certainly consistent with the military techno-thriller's character. Still, there are reasons for thinking of the book as less techno-thriller than proto-techno-thriller. After all, if the flying scenes would do a later techno-thriller credit the real star of the show technologically is Austin's bionics, not a major theme of that form, not least because they are more than usually futuristic for the genre--science fiction-al, in a way that subsequent Steve Austin adventures were. Thus did the third book in the Cyborg series offer crypto-history involving "ancient astronauts," the fourth an artificially intelligent computer. such details Cyborg and its sequels look a lot more Clive Cussler than Tom Clancy, even if representative of the trend leading to the latter.

The First Weekend of Summer is Upon Us. How Will The Fall Guy Do?

These days Boxoffice Pro seems to be out of the long-range forecasting business, and so all we had to go on from the first week of April up until now in regard to The Fall Guy has been its initial prediction of a $20-$40 million opening weekend for the movie, without the usual updates. The weekend forecasts, if less comprehensive than before, still appear, however--and the estimate they published Wednesday has that movie pulling in $30-$40 million, suggesting that the outlook has become a little more bullish over the past month, with regard to the bottom end of the range if not the top. Still, the publication's staff are not unmindful of the film's disadvantages, noting here that even compared with projects like Charlie's Angels (which did not do so well in 2019), the original "The Fall Guy did not leave a substantial cultural footprint," that indeed "[a] vast majority of audiences under the age of 30 probably wouldn't remember who Lee Majors was," while those who were actually fans of the original "may be put off" by what they have done with the material (certainly I think they would not care for "Kenough" crying in his truck to Taylor Swift, among much, much else in just the few bits of the film we saw in that "Everything" trailer), such that this movie "may be one of those cases where the filmmakers wind up pleasing no one in trying to please everyone."

Of course, the critics loved it--but then claquing is their job. The audience gets its say now, and we will see if the film's strengths will outweigh its all too numerous and obvious disadvantages. But where the bigger picture is concerned one does well to remember that even the $40 million of the high end of this film's range will still work out to the weakest opening for the first big movie of the summer in nearly two decades, making for an inauspicious beginning to this hugely important season for the industry.

The North American Box Office During the First Third of 2024

During 2015-2019 the first third of the year--the January through April period--the North American box office averaged $4.4 billion in 2023 dollars. In 2023 the figure was a comparatively meager $2.6 billion--about 59 percent of that total.

By contrast the North American box office just barely broke $2 billion (taking in $2.04 billion by April 30, or more like $1.97 billion when we adjust for inflation)--a more than one-fifth drop from 2023 for the same four-month period, and an even larger, more than halfway, drop, from the 2015-2019 average. Putting this situation more fully into context one may say that it continues the pattern from the last third of 2023, which had similarly been depressed--or, rather, the pattern evident for the last year. (The twelve month May 2023-April 2024 period saw just $8.25 billion collected in 2023 dollars--as against $14 billion for the equivalent periods between May 2014 and April 2019, with even that including the bump from the extreme overperformances of Barbie and Oppenheimer.)

Thus do the hard times continue.

How Did April 2024 Go For the Box Office?

In 2015-2019 movie ticket sales in North America during the month of April averaged $1.1 billion in 2023 dollars. Admittedly the number was bumped up by summer beginning early in 2018-2019 with the release of the two parts of the big climax to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Three with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, but the average for 2015-2017 is still $1 billion without them. In 2023 April did fall a bit short of that, but not by much--the mega-hit that The Super Mario Bros. Movie was raising the total to $900 million in the same terms--90 percent of the 2015-2017 figure. (Had the rest of the year gone as well we would have spoken of a near-complete recovery of the box office to its pre-pandemic level, rather than a "new normal" for it such as I am discussing now, with North Americans going to the theater a couple of times a year instead of four times a year as before.)

As I remarked a few weeks ago, while after a depressed fall, and January-February period, March saw the box office finally improve on the prior year's performance (largely thanks to Dune, with a little help from Ghostbusters and Godzilla), I expected that April would bring with it a return to the earlier, depressed condition. And indeed, while Godzilla performed more or less in line with reasonable expectations for the film, Ghostbusters less well than some hoped though far from the total flop some might also have feared in light of how unimpressed people were with it, it was far from enough to carry the month the way the releases of prior years have. Ending up with a mere $427 million grossed (assuming the 3.2 percent inflation seen over the past year, $414 million in 2023 dollars), this makes for a take about 38 percent of the 2015-2019 average, and 43 percent of even the more modest 2015-2017 average. The result is that the year continues to see the box office take run far behind that of the equivalent period in 2023, never mind the pre-pandemic years--with, for the time being at least, May not seeming to offer much respite, certainly going by the numbers I have seen for The Fall Guy, the next Planet of the Apes film and the plausible prospects of the next Mad Max movie.

Revisiting the Prospects of Deadpool & Wolverine

Like a great many others in discussing the upcoming return of Deadpool I have written of the film as "Deadpool 3," not just because this was a lot more convenient than having to write Deadpool & Wolverine over and over again, but because the film actually seemed to me to actually be a Deadpool 3. However, the film's director Shawn Levy took issue with this, insisting that this is not merely Deadpool 3 but properly speaking, a Deadpool and Wolverine movie that should be referred to accordingly (as Deadpool & Wolverine). I took this for just the usual pretension of film publicity, but since then the studio has released a new trailer for the film--which, I think, really does justify the view of the film as not merely a Deadpool movie with Wolverine in it, but a genuine team-up of the two characters in a movie really about the both of them and the big adventure they have together (Deadpool and Wolverine's Excellent Adventure!).

Having raised the subject it seems an opportune moment to look back at my prediction for the film's box office gross from January. Back then I suggested an extreme range for the global gross of $150 million-$700 million, and $400-$450 million the territory in which the film would most likely finish its theatrical run. Given that the box office remains depressed compared to what it was in 2023, never mind the 2015-2019 period, and that this has been significantly connected with franchise fatigue extending in particular to superhero fatigue, I still think caution is in order--the more in as Deadpool and especially X-Men were both traveling a path of diminishing returns commercially. (Recall the reception X-Men: Dark Phoenix got?) Going by the more easily quantifiable factors my conclusion still seems to me to be sound.

However, there are also the less easily quantifiable factors that undeniably matter. First and foremost it seems to me that there is a real measure of affection out there for both these characters, and for Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in these roles, and plausibly for the idea of a team-up between the two--and that this may all be the stronger for the years that have passed since audiences last saw either of them. I will add that the expletive-filled trailer for the film promises to "deliver the goods" here with respect to both action and the Deadpool brand of humor, while the makers of the film seem to be making a real effort to appeal to casual viewers (assuring them that this is one Marvel movie for which people will "not have to do homework", a requirement that was probably a liability for movies like Dr. Strange 2 and Captain Marvel 2), while at the same time offering something to hardcore fans (like the fact that, as this trailer confirms, Wolverine will for the first time ever appear in the costume from the comics and cartoons). All significant points in the film's favor, that going by the Internet chatter seem to be mattering with the audience, the movie is also likely to benefit from the same thing that Top Gun 2 did back in 2022--weaker than usual competition. (It is symbolic that this summer actually opens with Ryan Gosling in an adaptation of The Fall Guy.) This seems all the more the case in that last year's Barbie and Oppenheimer showed how a late summer release can really clean up, especially if what came before did not get theatergoers too excited.

Taking this into account I feel more bullish about the film. Do I think that it will take the Marvel Cinematic Universe back to its Phase Three glory days? No, that is more than any one movie can do, especially at this stage of things, with the market sharply contracted from what it was in 2017-2019, and this particular movie some way off the main line of the franchise.* Do I think it will make a billion dollars the way the first Deadpool did (adjusted for inflation)? That seems to me a very tall order for the same reasons. But looking at the numbers I presented earlier I think that as things stand now I would be less surprised if the film went over the $450 million mark than if it undershot the $400 million mark; that, in fact, a gross approaching or even reaching $700 million is more plausible than I would have thought three months ago. Pretty respectable these days, even with the hefty reported budget it might just let the film turn a respectable nine figure profit, and in the process restore some of the luster to the Marvel brand, not taking us back to 2019 but giving them a chance to keep what is probably the best they can hope for, a franchise that may continue to be a reliable (if more modest) earner even after its peak has passed.

* In 2017-2019 North American ticket sales stood at 3.5 per capita. In 2023 they were more like 2.2 per capita, a 38 percent drop, and 2024 will be lucky to match it.

Just How Profitable Was Guardians of the Galaxy 3?

It's that time of year again--Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament!

At the time of this writing Deadline has provided only the films making the tenth and ninth spots on the list. The #10 position was taken by PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie--a feature film tie-in with the TV cartoon.

I admit that this one was not on my radar at all, and have nothing to say about it. By contrast I had expected the #9 movie, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, to place here--because if an underperformer in comparison with its predecessors and some of the more bullish expectations held out for the film in the months prior to its release in a year in which so many big-budget films flopped it still looked like a respectable earner, with my reading of the figures back in May making me think a $100 million take in even the more pessimistic scenario I had in mind.

The movie's making the list means that Deadline offers us the numbers about this one. According to these the final bill on Guardians of the Galaxy 3 came to $550 million--about 2.2 times the $250 million production budget, counting the $90 million absorbed by participations and residuals and the like. The movie's total revenue was $674 million, about 55 percent of that theatrical revenue (thanks to the film doing a bit better than the bottom end of the range I discussed, pulling in, instead of $700-$750 million, about $860 million globally). The result was a net profit of $124 million according to Deadline's calculation. Computed another way the profit equals 23 percent of the outlay.

How do these figures compare with the numbers on the prior two Guardians films?

For Guardians of the Galaxy 2 the figure Deadline computed was a net profit of $154 million (a bit under $200 million in today's terms) on total costs of $515 million--yielding a 30 percent return.

For the original Guardians of the Galaxy the figures were a profit of $204 million (some $270 million in today's terms) on an outlay of $520 million, working out to a 39 percent return.

The result is that the original film was, both in terms of the return on expenditure and absolute return, the most profitable, the second film less profitable than that, the third film least profitable of all--affirming a trend of diminishing returns on the franchise from the monetary standpoint that seems reflective of the diminishing returns on the bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of which it was a part. Of course, that said Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $100 million+ profit still makes it a very worthwhile investment--but with the direction in which this series has moved (a 40 percent drop in relative return, a more than half drop in absolute return), to say nothing of the broader trend with regard to the MCU, the superhero film and the high concept franchise film as we have long known it, should give any astute investor pause in regard to the idea of a Guardians of the Galaxy 4.

Of course, we are likely to be getting one anyway.

Disney Dethroned?

As I remarked in a prior post Deadline is now in the midst of its annual "Most Valuable Blockbuster" tournament. Starting from the bottom of the top ten they have already identified the tenth and ninth-ranking films--the latter of which is Guardians of the Galaxy, which they make clear is Disney's only film to make the list in 2023.

Just one film--and that a mere #9 ranker.

Compare that to how Disney fared in the glory years of the mid- and late 2010s. Disney had the #1 film in 2015 (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), and four in the top ten. In 2016 it missed the #1 position, with its highest-ranking film Rogue One getting just the number three spot, but had five films in the top ten. And then it claimed the #1 position three years running, all while maintaining a disproportionate presence generally, with three films in 2017 and 2018 each (the top three in 2018's case), and then in the annus mirabilis of 2019, having an astonishing seven of the top ten, including, again, the top three (Avengers: Endgame, Frozen 2, The Lion King, Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4, Aladdin, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker).*

Of course, that things went this way is unlikely to be very surprising to anyone who has paid attention to the box office during the last year or so, given how even in a year of flops Disney's offerings were conspicuous disappointments--Indiana Jones 5 and Captain Marvel 2 most notoriously, but also The Little Mermaid remake, Ant-Man 3, Wish and Elemental (which may have managed to turn a profit, but still looked a weak performer by Pixar's long exceptional standard). Indeed, it was my guess that on the list of the biggest loss-makers that always accompanies Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers, Captain Marvel 2 and Indiana Jones 5 would occupy two of the top three spots--all as Disney would be represented elsewhere.

Still, it seems only fair to ask how this came about. Simply put, during the twenty-first century Disney pursued a particular strategy--"Buy up every top-line franchise and brand you can and exploit them ruthlessly." Doing this with Lucasfilm, Marvel and Pixar, as well as its own animated classics-heavy brand, it scored much more than its share of hits. (Again, seven of the top ten most profitable films of 2019 as reckoned at the time!) But the market has changed--so much so that the question now seems to be whether Disney, and for that matter everyone else in Hollywood, is capable of changing with it.

* One may, of course, quibble with the numbers in hindsight given that the procedures of the British film subsidy system keep indicating higher outlays than are usually reported in these lists (as was the case with Avengers 3 and 4), but Disney is unlikely to be the only studio playing games here, and it seems to me that even taking this into account this still broadly reflects how things stood at the time.

Taylor Swift and Five Nights at Freddy's Made Deadline's Top Ten Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023?

Previously thinking about the likely makeup of Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers of 2023 I suggested the Taylor Swift concert film and Five Nights at Freddy's would get some recognition--but on the list of smaller films that made relatively large profits, rather than the list of "most valuable blockbusters." However, we see Taylor Swift: The Era Tour ranked at #7, and Five Nights at Freddy's at #8 on that very list--a development very surprising given that, where overall gross is concerned, they did not rank all that highly in that year. Where the listed global grosses at Box Office Mojo are concerned Taylor Swift's film not only did not make the top ten, but failed even to make the top twenty, ending up at only #23--behind that notorious flop The Flash (#21), for example.* However, Swift's film was also relatively low-cost, a $15 million production (one-twentieth of what The Flash cost). The result was that when all was said and done the movie, between its $261 million in ticket sales, and subsequent and associated revenues, made a $172 million profit. Thus did it also go for Five Nights at Freddy's--that movie, between costing a little more money and making a little more money than The Eras Tour ending up just a little less profitable than Swift's film (pulling in $161 million according to the Deadline calculation).

Those who anticipated the films would do well seem to be saying "I told you so" --but this seems mainly because they were confident in those movies' prospects, in large part because of personal enthusiasm about them, and focusing on that would make us miss two very large, important developments here.

One is that these comparatively low-grossing movies outdid so many bigger-grossing movies profit-wise, with all that suggests about the declining viability of those movies that were for so long Hollywood's principal moneymakers (like The Flash, which made more money than the Taylor Swift film, but seems certain to produce a nine figure loss for WBD).

The other is that the bar for making the top ten list is a lot lower than it used to be. Back in 2019 Taylor Swift's film would not only not have ranked at #7 with a profit of $172 million, but would not have made the top ten at all. In 2019 the tenth-ranked film on Deadline's list was the Jumanji sequel, with $236 million, while the seventh-ranked film, the live-action adaptation of Aladdin, reportedly made a profit of $356 million, twice what Taylor Swift's film did, even before we consider the considerable inflation of these years (a more than 20 percent rise in prices since 2019).

Together the two factors are indicative of a situation of a shrunken film market--doing well in which may mean playing by very different rules from those that prevailed just a few years ago when Disney was the champion.

Will Xander Cage Come Back for One Last Adventure? (Thoughts on the Possibility of a XXX4)

The Xander Cage (or XXX) spy-fi franchise has had rather a rocky history. Very much of the '90s in its origins, bringing together as it did the American spy-fi boom and resurgence of the 007 franchise in that decade with the "extreme" craze, the idea behind it was to update the James Bond-style spy for "a new generation."

The resulting, first, XXX film did well, but not that well (a $142 million domestic gross, it qualified only for 15th place on the list of the year's top grossers), and the film's star Vin Diesel walked away, the sequel proceeded without him (indeed, Diesel's character Xander Cage was supposedly killed off), and flopped, after which plans for a third movie were, as I remarked in 2012, stuck in development hell.

What brought back the franchise back was the way that Vin Diesel's career resurged largely on the strength of the second wind that the Fast and Furious franchise got with its fourth film (from which point it went from strength to strength through the next several films), which was in good part a matter of how well the movies were doing in the Chinese market. The peak of the series, Furious 7, saw the movie take in a sensational $1.5 billion worldwide, twice as much as the preceding movie that had previously been the series' best performance, with more of that money actually coming from China than from North America, well as it did there. (The grosses in the two countries were $390 million and $353 million, respectively.)

The result was that that next XXX film finally happened--hitting theaters in North America in the dump month of January 2017, an expression of little confidence in the movie, but also the expectation that amid relatively weak competition it might clean up. It did not quite do that in Hollywood's home market, taking in a mere $45 million--but making almost six times that much internationally, adding a bit over $300 million to the total with over half that ($164 million) coming from just China.

Accordingly we heard about plans for a fourth film--because back then it still made some sense to back a relatively costly film on the expectation of a big gross in China. However, seven years later any such film is still just being talked about, and it is not hard to imagine why. The disruptions of the pandemic apart, and the way that the Fast and Furious films' decline cannot but suggest that Diesel having this kind of adventure is not the draw it was just a short time ago, franchise films generally are doing less well. Indeed, if we hear less about the decline of spy-fi than we do the decline of the superhero film that the commercial decline of that form is nonetheless real (you can see it in the gross of No Time to Die, of Mission: Impossible 7, of again those Fast and Furious films), while the XXX franchise was pretty marginal to begin with by its standard (Xander Cage never coming close to rivaling 007, Ethan Hunt or even, after he and his gang turned superspies, Dom Toretto), and the Chinese market that was so important to the last film's profitability has become far less open to Hollywood.

The result is that all those factors that made a fourth film in the series a plausible business decision have vanished. On that basis one might think that as a result the franchise will not manage to escape development hell again. However, Hollywood's determination to exploit every franchise far past the point of diminishing and even negative returns for lack of inclination to do anything else seems to only be growing more pathological. The result is that I cannot see the greenlighting of a new Xander Cage being a sound business decision on the part of the Suits--but then again, neither does a Twister 2 or a Gladiator 2 seem to be that, and both those movies are scheduled to come to a theater near you later this year.