Back in May I wrote that Hollywood was desperate to see Inside Out 2 be a hit because it would take the movie's success as a signal that it could go on doing what it wants to do--instead of actually get creative, keep milking brand-name franchises, not least by greenlighting sequels no one ever asked for. Now mere weeks after Inside Out 2 hit theaters, and not much more than a week after its breaking the billion-dollar barrier in that way that no animated film since 2019 managed bar last year's The Super Mario Bros. Movie (even Minions: The Rise of Gru only made it to $940 million back in the summer of 2022), we hear that a Shrek 5 is coming our way. A fifth installment in a franchise that had its last movie way back in 2010, which fourth film was, as is usually the case with these things, regarded as pushing it, and a significantly lower-grosser than its predecessors, it is no accident that the main line of the franchise was moribund for so many years.*
In their seizing on the excuse to try and squeeze more blood from that particular stone Hollywood's decisionmakers prove just as predictable as their movies--all as it seems we have every reason to expect more news of the type in the weeks and months ahead.
* Shrek 4's domestic gross of $238 million in 2010 was, in real terms, about 27 percent down from that of the 2001 original, 53 percent down from that of the 2004 sequel, and 30 percent down from the immediately preceding third film in 2007--though admittedly the international gross compensated somewhat for the domestic shortfall (the movie making twice what it did domestically in the international market). The only other release the franchise has had since 2010 was a sequel to the spin-off Puss in Boots, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which took in a comparatively modest $186 million back in 2022.
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
We Are More Than Halfway into 2024. How is the Box Office Holding Up?
As I remarked June 2024 saw the box office (in spite of the success of Inside Out 2) take in less money than it did a year, when June was seeing flop after flop. As one might guess the result was that if the month does not look so bad as those which preceded it, this is only because of how horrible those months were. It is still the case that in 2024 five of the first six months (all but March) have seen the 2024 box office take in less than the same month a year before.
Altogether, where by the end of June the box office had collected $4.4 billion in 2023, as of the same point in the year in 2024 the box office has taken in a mere $3.6 billion. Adjusted for inflation the figure is worse, with the 2023 gross edging toward the equivalent of $4.6 billion in June 2024 dollars, leaving it down about 22 percent. Compared with the 2015-2019 average (calculated in the same terms) it looks worse still. In June 2024 dollars the box office was usually up over $7.3 billion by this point, so that the box office grossed only about half of the pre-pandemic norm.
Of course, one may argue that the second half of the year promises better. Inside Out 2 has already added $100 million more to the month's box office, while Despicable Me 4 has had a respectable opening. Many are also at least somewhat optimistic about Twisters, while of course, Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters in the month's last weekend. Still, the month will have quite some ways to go simply to match the nearly $1.4 billion take of the month that saw both Barbie and Oppenheimer make their debuts, never mind compare with the still stronger real grosses of 2015-2019--while that will still leave five months to go in 2024. Even a considerably better performance during these next six months than was seen in the first six months of the year could still just get the box office to the $8 billion mark that entertainment industry commentators treated as such a bleak prospect last year, all as the kind of improvement on what we saw in 2023--for a minimum, think a gross closer to $10 billion than $9 billion--seems a very tall order indeed. (We would have to see theater business double from its level in the first half of the year during the second half--or putting it another way, moviegoing bounce back much closer to pre-pandemic levels than anything seen since 2019.) The result is that while Inside Out 2 has been an undeniable success, and I think there is good reason to be bullish on Deadpool & Wolverine's Excellent Adventure and perhaps a few other films, I am more, rather than less, persuaded of my reading of the market as facing a fundamental structural crisis as Americans go to the theaters less, not least because they are becoming harder to draw in with the same old crapola--and, far from the sequel-obsessed business-as-usual remaining viable, Hollywood doing well to look at some new strategies for keeping itself in business.
Altogether, where by the end of June the box office had collected $4.4 billion in 2023, as of the same point in the year in 2024 the box office has taken in a mere $3.6 billion. Adjusted for inflation the figure is worse, with the 2023 gross edging toward the equivalent of $4.6 billion in June 2024 dollars, leaving it down about 22 percent. Compared with the 2015-2019 average (calculated in the same terms) it looks worse still. In June 2024 dollars the box office was usually up over $7.3 billion by this point, so that the box office grossed only about half of the pre-pandemic norm.
Of course, one may argue that the second half of the year promises better. Inside Out 2 has already added $100 million more to the month's box office, while Despicable Me 4 has had a respectable opening. Many are also at least somewhat optimistic about Twisters, while of course, Deadpool & Wolverine hits theaters in the month's last weekend. Still, the month will have quite some ways to go simply to match the nearly $1.4 billion take of the month that saw both Barbie and Oppenheimer make their debuts, never mind compare with the still stronger real grosses of 2015-2019--while that will still leave five months to go in 2024. Even a considerably better performance during these next six months than was seen in the first six months of the year could still just get the box office to the $8 billion mark that entertainment industry commentators treated as such a bleak prospect last year, all as the kind of improvement on what we saw in 2023--for a minimum, think a gross closer to $10 billion than $9 billion--seems a very tall order indeed. (We would have to see theater business double from its level in the first half of the year during the second half--or putting it another way, moviegoing bounce back much closer to pre-pandemic levels than anything seen since 2019.) The result is that while Inside Out 2 has been an undeniable success, and I think there is good reason to be bullish on Deadpool & Wolverine's Excellent Adventure and perhaps a few other films, I am more, rather than less, persuaded of my reading of the market as facing a fundamental structural crisis as Americans go to the theaters less, not least because they are becoming harder to draw in with the same old crapola--and, far from the sequel-obsessed business-as-usual remaining viable, Hollywood doing well to look at some new strategies for keeping itself in business.
The June 2024 Box Office
Inside Out 2 is, at this point, a confirmed hit, breaking as it did the billion-dollar barrier as it topped both the domestic and international grosses of the original not only in current dollar but real terms.* Hollywood, which was desperate to see this movie be a hit (as a signal that big franchise movies are still salable and the human refuse in Tinseltown's executive suites have an excuse to go on greenlighting sequels no one asked for), is of course completely ecstatic--so much so that amid the ecstasies one might easily overlook the larger picture. After all, even a hit this big cannot save the industry, its year, or even its month--with the result that, as Furiosa proved a flop, and Bad Boys 4 failed even to match the merely middling gross of Bad Boys 3, even Inside Out 2's mighty performance left June 2024 a lower-grossing month for Hollywood than June 2023, which was itself no prize. With Fast X and The Little Mermaid sputtering out well below expectations, Elemental opening disappointingly, the latest Transformers installment continuing rather than bucking that franchise's downward trajectory, and Indiana Jones and The Flash proving themselves two of the three biggest flops of the year, June 2023 saw the box office collect just 70 percent of the 2015-2019 norm in real terms (calculated in June 2024 dollars). June 2024 saw less revenue than that, failing to break the billion-dollar barrier the way the box office did a year before (with some $966 million collected, as against June 2023's $1.004 billion). Adjusted for inflation this works out to just 93 percent of what June 2023 did in box office revenue, and a mere 65 percent of what would have been expected for the month of June in the years before the pandemic.
The result is that Inside Out 2's success is just part of a more complex picture, however much Hollywood's courtiers in the entertainment press may prefer to think otherwise.
* The original Inside Out made a bit over $850 million, some $1.13 billion in today's currency. The new film has made over $1.25 billion thus far, and counting, with a domestic gross of nearly $550 million in the till (versus the original's $470 million) and an international one of $720 million (versus that one's $660 million).
The result is that Inside Out 2's success is just part of a more complex picture, however much Hollywood's courtiers in the entertainment press may prefer to think otherwise.
* The original Inside Out made a bit over $850 million, some $1.13 billion in today's currency. The new film has made over $1.25 billion thus far, and counting, with a domestic gross of nearly $550 million in the till (versus the original's $470 million) and an international one of $720 million (versus that one's $660 million).
Monday, July 8, 2024
More Superheroic Nostalgia--and How We Really Remember the '90s (Cory Doctorow Reviews Austin Grossman's Fight Me)
After recently writing about Deadpool as a distinctly '90s creation, and the films as an experience of a bit of the '90s in our day, I happened across Cory Doctorow's review of Austin Grossman's just released novel Fight Me--likewise a superhero tale deeply evocative of the '90s in Doctorow's appraisal.
Doctorow's review, as is usually the case with the novels that he covers at Pluralistic, was strongly positive, but rather than the book's merits (or demerits) what really interested me about the piece was Doctorow suggestion that the book can be read as "The Avengers Meets The Big Chill," and his turn from there to considering Generation X from the standpoint of 2024, with, as the evocation of The Big Chill indicates, the generation's activism foregrounded in that.
This surprised me. If the '90s, and the Generation X that was young during that decade, undeniably had its activism--in which Doctorow was most certainly a participant (and remains one, most obviously on the "tech" front)--it would never have occurred to me to compare Generation X's activism with that of the '60s in the way that he does. Recently writing of the period it seemed to me that, in Robert Merton's terms, rather than "rebels," the archetypal nonconformists of the '90s were "ritualists." These are persons who are not out to change the system the way rebels are, but do what they have to in order to get along in spite of not believing in the system--as with the '90s "slacker" going through the motions with ostentatious unenthusiasm, "ironically," for lack of hope that the world could be anything else in that day in which the conventional wisdom held us to be at the "end of history." Moreover, the slacker was themselves only a counterpoint to the prevailing ultra-conformism. (In what other sort of era, after all, could one sell "market populism?")
Indeed, more than any other part of the '60s in that '60s-nostalgia-saturated period, the activism of the '60s seemed far in the past, with that '90s cinema classic The Big Lebowski, for all its characteristic postmodernist superficiality and incoherence (or perhaps because of it) summing up the situation in its juxtaposition of its two Jeffrey Lebowskis. One was a washed-out old hippie who, in spite of having been one of the Seattle Seven on the eve of the Gulf War shows no sign of any oppositional stance whatsoever as he quotes without irony George H.W. Bush's rhetoric of a "line in the sand" and hangs around a bowling alley with a caricature of John Milius; while the other Lebowski was a Dickensian businessman who despised everything the first Lebowski had ever stood for as a "revolution" that was happily over with "the bums" having lost.
That still seems to me to represent the essence of the '90s that way--but every era has more than one side to it, and if, by comparison with the movements of the '60s protest in the '90s was a marginal thing, the period did have that other side to it, as Doctorow reminds us in his review.
Doctorow's review, as is usually the case with the novels that he covers at Pluralistic, was strongly positive, but rather than the book's merits (or demerits) what really interested me about the piece was Doctorow suggestion that the book can be read as "The Avengers Meets The Big Chill," and his turn from there to considering Generation X from the standpoint of 2024, with, as the evocation of The Big Chill indicates, the generation's activism foregrounded in that.
This surprised me. If the '90s, and the Generation X that was young during that decade, undeniably had its activism--in which Doctorow was most certainly a participant (and remains one, most obviously on the "tech" front)--it would never have occurred to me to compare Generation X's activism with that of the '60s in the way that he does. Recently writing of the period it seemed to me that, in Robert Merton's terms, rather than "rebels," the archetypal nonconformists of the '90s were "ritualists." These are persons who are not out to change the system the way rebels are, but do what they have to in order to get along in spite of not believing in the system--as with the '90s "slacker" going through the motions with ostentatious unenthusiasm, "ironically," for lack of hope that the world could be anything else in that day in which the conventional wisdom held us to be at the "end of history." Moreover, the slacker was themselves only a counterpoint to the prevailing ultra-conformism. (In what other sort of era, after all, could one sell "market populism?")
Indeed, more than any other part of the '60s in that '60s-nostalgia-saturated period, the activism of the '60s seemed far in the past, with that '90s cinema classic The Big Lebowski, for all its characteristic postmodernist superficiality and incoherence (or perhaps because of it) summing up the situation in its juxtaposition of its two Jeffrey Lebowskis. One was a washed-out old hippie who, in spite of having been one of the Seattle Seven on the eve of the Gulf War shows no sign of any oppositional stance whatsoever as he quotes without irony George H.W. Bush's rhetoric of a "line in the sand" and hangs around a bowling alley with a caricature of John Milius; while the other Lebowski was a Dickensian businessman who despised everything the first Lebowski had ever stood for as a "revolution" that was happily over with "the bums" having lost.
That still seems to me to represent the essence of the '90s that way--but every era has more than one side to it, and if, by comparison with the movements of the '60s protest in the '90s was a marginal thing, the period did have that other side to it, as Doctorow reminds us in his review.
Is Deadpool Actually Hollywood's Most Successful Piece of '90s Nostalgia to Date?
I remember how when it hit theaters critics received Deadpool as a great novelty because it was a dark, edgy, R-rated film that took an ostentatiously postmodernist, "meta," approach to its material.
Instead of being struck by how novel it supposedly was, I was struck by how familiar it was, and especially by how '90s it all was. After all, dark and edgy R-rated superhero films were fairly common in that decade--when we had The Crow, and Barb Wire, and Spawn, and Blade.
Those films may not have gone as far down the path of "meta" as Deadpool, but they had their share of self-aware silliness nonetheless, quite naturally given how this sensibility absolutely saturated, even defined, the film of the decade. Indeed, watching the first Deadpool, with its combination of edgelordism in the surface details with conventionality and even triteness in the underlying essentials, its ceaseless and often self-deprecatory fourth wall-breaking and rapid-fire pop culture references, its barrage of tasteless humor, I felt myself to be watching a '90s indie movie in the tradition of Smith, Tarantino et. al. about superheroes.
Indeed, it is entirely relevant that Deadpool was himself a creation of the 1990s--a Rob Liefeld co-creation who first appeared in the December 1990 issue of New Mutants who was entirely in tune with the period's notorious penchant for anti-heroes and general edginess and the "extreme"--and snarky irony about the whole thing. And in fact I found it strange that few commented on this--an indication that the increasing overgenerousness of the average film review reflects not only increasing claquing, but plain and simple ignorance of their subject among the current generation of "professional" critics.
Still, if few have remarked it, it strikes me that, between the intense "'90s-ness" of Deadpool and Hollywood's failure to have much success with evocations of the '90s, Deadpool may well be the most successful piece of '90s cinematic nostalgia to date, with Deadpool & Wolverine continuing to walk that path--not least by teaming Deadpool up with Wolverine in the costume a generation remembers from the still well-loved '90s-era X-Men cartoon to do battle with the just-barely-missed-the-'90s-chronologically-and- arguably-actually-really-'90s-in-essence Cassandra Nova.
* Spawn, of course, was trimmed to get a PG-13 in its 1997 theatrical release, but the R-rated Director's Cut later came out on video.
Instead of being struck by how novel it supposedly was, I was struck by how familiar it was, and especially by how '90s it all was. After all, dark and edgy R-rated superhero films were fairly common in that decade--when we had The Crow, and Barb Wire, and Spawn, and Blade.
Those films may not have gone as far down the path of "meta" as Deadpool, but they had their share of self-aware silliness nonetheless, quite naturally given how this sensibility absolutely saturated, even defined, the film of the decade. Indeed, watching the first Deadpool, with its combination of edgelordism in the surface details with conventionality and even triteness in the underlying essentials, its ceaseless and often self-deprecatory fourth wall-breaking and rapid-fire pop culture references, its barrage of tasteless humor, I felt myself to be watching a '90s indie movie in the tradition of Smith, Tarantino et. al. about superheroes.
Indeed, it is entirely relevant that Deadpool was himself a creation of the 1990s--a Rob Liefeld co-creation who first appeared in the December 1990 issue of New Mutants who was entirely in tune with the period's notorious penchant for anti-heroes and general edginess and the "extreme"--and snarky irony about the whole thing. And in fact I found it strange that few commented on this--an indication that the increasing overgenerousness of the average film review reflects not only increasing claquing, but plain and simple ignorance of their subject among the current generation of "professional" critics.
Still, if few have remarked it, it strikes me that, between the intense "'90s-ness" of Deadpool and Hollywood's failure to have much success with evocations of the '90s, Deadpool may well be the most successful piece of '90s cinematic nostalgia to date, with Deadpool & Wolverine continuing to walk that path--not least by teaming Deadpool up with Wolverine in the costume a generation remembers from the still well-loved '90s-era X-Men cartoon to do battle with the just-barely-missed-the-'90s-chronologically-and- arguably-actually-really-'90s-in-essence Cassandra Nova.
* Spawn, of course, was trimmed to get a PG-13 in its 1997 theatrical release, but the R-rated Director's Cut later came out on video.
Why Hollywood Needs Deadpool & Wolverine to be a Hit
Not long ago I wrote that one of the reasons why Hollywood was so bullish on Inside Out 2 was that it needed for the film to be a success because, unlike those more idiosyncratic films that were successes last year (Barbie, Oppenheimer, etc.), such a success would affirm what it so badly wants to believe in, namely the continued salability of brand-name franchise films of the familiar kinds--like sequels to past Disney-Pixar animated spectacles--that had such a miserable time at the box office in 2023 and early 2024, yet remain so important to Hollywood's business model.
The same kind of need is operative in the anticipations for Deadpool & Wolverine, which box office-watchers are looking to not only for more proof of the broad salability of brand-name franchise films, but more specifically affirmation of the salability of the superhero film that has had an especially bad time (2023 bringing The Flash, and Captain Marvel 2, and Aquaman 2, and Ant-Man 3, as well as lesser failures like Shazam 2), and in which not just Disney-Marvel but Sony and the WBD remain so heavily invested. (Thus does Disney's Bob Iger actually seem to think that putting out a "mere" three Marvel movies a year is some display of great restraint on the studio's part!)
At the time of this writing Inside Out 2's status as at least a commercial success seems unquestionable. (The sequel has, even after adjusting for inflation, overtaken the domestic gross of the original film as of its third weekend in play as the film continues to show fairly good holds, and broken the $1 billion mark globally, so that its overtopping the original at the worldwide level also seems all but assured.) Deadpool & Wolverine has yet to hit theaters, but thus far its chances of being a major hit seem excellent, with an opening weekend in the vicinity of $200 million looking not just possible but probable--and with it a billion dollar-plus gross for the film that will be a franchise best not just for the Deadpool trilogy, but the now quarter century-old X-Men franchise of which it is a part.
Of course, even if the film performs as so many clearly hope it will indicate only so much given how idiosyncratic the Deadpool movies are, as "edgy" and "meta" R-rated oddities of which audiences have had less than most of the other heroes around, which in this case has had its prospects boosted by the difficult-to-repeat gimmick of Deadpool's teaming with longtime audience favorite Wolverine. It will thus be far from solid proof that the audience is feeling its Phase Three eagerness for more Marvel Cinematic Universe films--but all the excuse that "confirmation bias"-driven Suits will need to greenlight another slew of big-budget superhero films that could easily blow still more holes in the balance sheets of studios already buckling under the insane financial battering of the last half decade, because to them and their masters that is so greatly preferable to changing how they do business especially if the pattern of 2023 was anything but a fluke.
The same kind of need is operative in the anticipations for Deadpool & Wolverine, which box office-watchers are looking to not only for more proof of the broad salability of brand-name franchise films, but more specifically affirmation of the salability of the superhero film that has had an especially bad time (2023 bringing The Flash, and Captain Marvel 2, and Aquaman 2, and Ant-Man 3, as well as lesser failures like Shazam 2), and in which not just Disney-Marvel but Sony and the WBD remain so heavily invested. (Thus does Disney's Bob Iger actually seem to think that putting out a "mere" three Marvel movies a year is some display of great restraint on the studio's part!)
At the time of this writing Inside Out 2's status as at least a commercial success seems unquestionable. (The sequel has, even after adjusting for inflation, overtaken the domestic gross of the original film as of its third weekend in play as the film continues to show fairly good holds, and broken the $1 billion mark globally, so that its overtopping the original at the worldwide level also seems all but assured.) Deadpool & Wolverine has yet to hit theaters, but thus far its chances of being a major hit seem excellent, with an opening weekend in the vicinity of $200 million looking not just possible but probable--and with it a billion dollar-plus gross for the film that will be a franchise best not just for the Deadpool trilogy, but the now quarter century-old X-Men franchise of which it is a part.
Of course, even if the film performs as so many clearly hope it will indicate only so much given how idiosyncratic the Deadpool movies are, as "edgy" and "meta" R-rated oddities of which audiences have had less than most of the other heroes around, which in this case has had its prospects boosted by the difficult-to-repeat gimmick of Deadpool's teaming with longtime audience favorite Wolverine. It will thus be far from solid proof that the audience is feeling its Phase Three eagerness for more Marvel Cinematic Universe films--but all the excuse that "confirmation bias"-driven Suits will need to greenlight another slew of big-budget superhero films that could easily blow still more holes in the balance sheets of studios already buckling under the insane financial battering of the last half decade, because to them and their masters that is so greatly preferable to changing how they do business especially if the pattern of 2023 was anything but a fluke.
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Cory Doctorow Writes About Tech
In the neoliberal era the conventional view has been to celebrate the "tech" sector as the absolute epitome of free-market "entrepreneurship," "innovation" and "meritocracy" are supposed to be the foundation and essence and glory of economic vitality generally and American capitalism particularly. Indeed, the country's politics, media, popular culture ceaselessly glorify it as the great legitimator of the prevailing economic and social ideology and model, with this attitude underlined by how even as he set about satirizing it Mike Judge's exceedingly conventional admiration of that hub of the "tech" sector ended up making the satire tepid stuff (the more obviously so when compared against Judge's Idiocracy, in which Judge did not hesitate in the slightest about being brutal as he "punched down").
By contrast the journalism of Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic offers a very different view of the tech world--as a scene of sociopath hucksters fighting tooth and nail against market forces, entrepreneurship, innovation, in defense of rent-generating monopolies built up through every anticompetitive practice in and out of the books that foist garbage on customers whose choices are to "take it, or take it," from their unsafe-at-any-speed software underpinning major national operations from pharmaceutical prescription to car dealing, to their Digital Rights Management device-packed and bricked-at-a-stroke gadgets, with this whole predatory process aided and abetted by a credulous and corrupt media propagandizing on behalf of and policymakers bowing and scraping before "Big Tech" as they do every other "Big" out there. A far less flattering picture of the sector than that to which we are subjected nonstop elsewhere, those weary of the propaganda of Silicon Valley's courtiers can find in Doctorow's writing much-needed honesty and insight--which, if seeming like a voice crying out in the wilderness in the face of the ceaseless propounding of the conventional view, is along with other such voices playing a part in challenging a "myth of Silicon Valley" that has only ever stood in the way of serious consideration and address of the challenges posed by new technologies, and the economics of our time.
By contrast the journalism of Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic offers a very different view of the tech world--as a scene of sociopath hucksters fighting tooth and nail against market forces, entrepreneurship, innovation, in defense of rent-generating monopolies built up through every anticompetitive practice in and out of the books that foist garbage on customers whose choices are to "take it, or take it," from their unsafe-at-any-speed software underpinning major national operations from pharmaceutical prescription to car dealing, to their Digital Rights Management device-packed and bricked-at-a-stroke gadgets, with this whole predatory process aided and abetted by a credulous and corrupt media propagandizing on behalf of and policymakers bowing and scraping before "Big Tech" as they do every other "Big" out there. A far less flattering picture of the sector than that to which we are subjected nonstop elsewhere, those weary of the propaganda of Silicon Valley's courtiers can find in Doctorow's writing much-needed honesty and insight--which, if seeming like a voice crying out in the wilderness in the face of the ceaseless propounding of the conventional view, is along with other such voices playing a part in challenging a "myth of Silicon Valley" that has only ever stood in the way of serious consideration and address of the challenges posed by new technologies, and the economics of our time.
The Myth of Silicon Valley--and the Very Different Reality
If you are even slightly attentive to economic reality then you will have likely noticed how much more attention the "tech" sector and its more prominent figures get than do their counterparts across the rest of the vast and highly diversified U.S. economy--exceedingly disproportionate attention. This has much to do with the development of an image of "Silicon Valley" that corresponds to how neoliberals want the public to picture capitalism generally and American capitalism particularly that associates it with
However, compounding the distortion is the fact that this image of tech is itself a matter of myth rather than reality--a fact so marginalized in contemporary discussion that one has to step outside the "entrepreneur"-singing, startup barking, tech-hyping courtiers to business of the media mainstream and look to, for example, the journalism of Cory Doctorow over at Pluralistic. The past month has seen Mr. Doctorow deliver a characteristically robust series of reports updating the interested on just how big is the gap between the hype and the reality which has ranged from the "scalesplaining" of social media companies, to the vileness that is "surveillance pricing," to the subject of dealer management software and its susceptibility to breaches whose disruptiveness has only grown over time (as Doctorow shows through the histories of such events at Equifax, Change Healthcare, and the crisis at CDK that recently disrupted car dealing in the United States)--each and every one of said pieces, per usual with Doctorow, worth not a skim but a proper word-for-word read from anyone even slightly interested in this subject (as anyone whose life is affected by this stuff, which is pretty much everyone who has not gone to such extremes to completely avoid anything and everything to do with the digital age that they are almost certainly not reading these words now).
Still, if you are new to this more critical perspective, or are not so new but have only time to look at just one item, I would particularly recommend Doctorow's piece about Microsoft's address of its products' security--precisely because here Doctorow presents of the story of the rise of Bill Gates and Microsoft in a way that is greatly and importantly different from the one with which Americans have been beaten over the head for as long as they can remember (Gates the inventor of genius, Gates the self-made man who rose from humble origins without any help whatsoever to be the richest man on Earth for most of a generation, Gates the embodiment of American meritocracy and the American Dream, Gates the humanitarian "philanthropist" leading the way on issues like climate change, Gates the model for all of the rest of us, etc., etc. ad nauseam).
Indeed, the facts would seem the extreme opposite of the endlessly promulgated "legend" in the way of so many Josiah Bounderbys past and present, so much so that even those who do not read journalists like Doctorow may well have encountered some of this in the past. Still, even if one has heard every bit before and remembers it still, the fact remains that given the endless reiteration of the "legend" intended to bury any other perception in avalanche-like fashion mere repetition of the truth has value, while there is what Doctorow does with it here--draw the bits and pieces normally presented in isolated fashion and easily ignored as the conventional picture endures to create a coherent, and more truthful, image that helps us understand the world better than before. As the critical sneers that have so often met the work of historians like Clive Ponting show, this important service is too little appreciated by even those who ought to know better.
"entrepreneurship" of the founder-run "startup" form and "creative destruction," technological dynamism, worldwide American technological leadership and [the] recently self-made fortunes of inventor-entrepreneursall as against, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith's "technostructure"-centered vision of a corporate planning system extremely remote from both the free market dynamics of orthodox economic theory, and the real-world experience of the rest of the public; a reality of technological stagnation that has made a joke of talk of an "information age" that can seem to have always been an attempt to deflect attention from an economy already traveled far down a path of not just relative decline but actual deindustrialization; and, contrary to the "market populist" line, not only the fact that a handful of people becoming "billionaires" say absolutely nothing of the real life chances of the many, but no reasonable person would imagine that New Money behaves any differently from Old Money in any way that counts in the lives of actual working people.
However, compounding the distortion is the fact that this image of tech is itself a matter of myth rather than reality--a fact so marginalized in contemporary discussion that one has to step outside the "entrepreneur"-singing, startup barking, tech-hyping courtiers to business of the media mainstream and look to, for example, the journalism of Cory Doctorow over at Pluralistic. The past month has seen Mr. Doctorow deliver a characteristically robust series of reports updating the interested on just how big is the gap between the hype and the reality which has ranged from the "scalesplaining" of social media companies, to the vileness that is "surveillance pricing," to the subject of dealer management software and its susceptibility to breaches whose disruptiveness has only grown over time (as Doctorow shows through the histories of such events at Equifax, Change Healthcare, and the crisis at CDK that recently disrupted car dealing in the United States)--each and every one of said pieces, per usual with Doctorow, worth not a skim but a proper word-for-word read from anyone even slightly interested in this subject (as anyone whose life is affected by this stuff, which is pretty much everyone who has not gone to such extremes to completely avoid anything and everything to do with the digital age that they are almost certainly not reading these words now).
Still, if you are new to this more critical perspective, or are not so new but have only time to look at just one item, I would particularly recommend Doctorow's piece about Microsoft's address of its products' security--precisely because here Doctorow presents of the story of the rise of Bill Gates and Microsoft in a way that is greatly and importantly different from the one with which Americans have been beaten over the head for as long as they can remember (Gates the inventor of genius, Gates the self-made man who rose from humble origins without any help whatsoever to be the richest man on Earth for most of a generation, Gates the embodiment of American meritocracy and the American Dream, Gates the humanitarian "philanthropist" leading the way on issues like climate change, Gates the model for all of the rest of us, etc., etc. ad nauseam).
Indeed, the facts would seem the extreme opposite of the endlessly promulgated "legend" in the way of so many Josiah Bounderbys past and present, so much so that even those who do not read journalists like Doctorow may well have encountered some of this in the past. Still, even if one has heard every bit before and remembers it still, the fact remains that given the endless reiteration of the "legend" intended to bury any other perception in avalanche-like fashion mere repetition of the truth has value, while there is what Doctorow does with it here--draw the bits and pieces normally presented in isolated fashion and easily ignored as the conventional picture endures to create a coherent, and more truthful, image that helps us understand the world better than before. As the critical sneers that have so often met the work of historians like Clive Ponting show, this important service is too little appreciated by even those who ought to know better.
Centrism and the Right: A Few Thoughts
Looking at political centrism as more than "middle of the roadness" but as a distinct ideological tendency these past few years my conclusion has been that this centrism is an adaptation of classical conservatism to the situation of the early Cold War. The resulting center has been fundamentally conservative and, if declaring itself equally opposed to extremisms of the right and left both, founded on anti-leftism rather than anti-extremism , and in fact usually partnering with a right in which it was always reluctant to see any extremism against a left it saw as inherently illegitimate.
That right-center combination pushed back against the left, minimized the concessions that the left's existence required (some readiness to provide which was usually what distinguished the center from the more plainly reactionary right), and ultimately marginalized the left. By the 1980s and even more so the 1990s this produced a situation where the left had simply ceased to exert any force at all. Meanwhile a center conservative to begin with, disinclined to put up much resistance to the still effectual right, accustomed to treating the right with respect in spite of the fact that the right showed the center no such respect, accommodated itself to the right's continued rightward pull over and over again.
All of this moved the center, the discourse, and even the right further rightwards--quite predictably given the dynamic discussed here, which would seem to, in the absence of a strong left, make the center's rightward shift, and even what some have called the "normalization" of the more extreme right, a default mode for a centrist-dominated politics. Moreover, this has been reinforced by the extent to which the center hastened upon the hugely unpopular course of abandoning its old function of securing social concessions in its rush to embrace neoliberalism, and an ascent of "status politics" inseparable from the weakening of the left, producing discontents which the right (even if itself even more staunchly neoliberal than the center) exploited through appeals against which a center with little emotional appeal to a broad public had few defenses, and little ability to compete. This disadvantaged a center that responded by accommodating itself to the right that much more--with this pattern exacerbated by the combination of crisis, anemic growth, repeated government combination of rescue of the financial sector with austerity for the public so much seen since 2007, and the absolute determination of centrists to stick by their more fundamental policies in spite of all the opprobrium that had come to be attached to them.
Considering all this as it has played out in American history over the twentieth and twenty-first century (as the Democratic Party of the New Deal gave way to the Democratic Party of the Neo-Liberals in the Clinton era, etc.) my first thought was that it was mainly relevant to a United States unique because of the extent to which American politics was defined by Cold War Anti-Communism, and the marginalization of the left, to a greater degree than in any other major Western country (such that what is called here "centrism" is what has passed for "liberalism" in America). However, I soon enough saw how some of these dynamics were operative in British politics. More recently reading political scientist Aurelien Mondon's discussion of the rightward trajectory of French politics it seems to me fairly clear that this same tendency of an ostensibly in the middle but actually deeply conservative center to come down hardest on the left and accommodate the right, pushing a country's politics in a rightward direction, has been operative there as well, with the consequences already seen, and now anticipated from the election for the country's National Assembly.
That right-center combination pushed back against the left, minimized the concessions that the left's existence required (some readiness to provide which was usually what distinguished the center from the more plainly reactionary right), and ultimately marginalized the left. By the 1980s and even more so the 1990s this produced a situation where the left had simply ceased to exert any force at all. Meanwhile a center conservative to begin with, disinclined to put up much resistance to the still effectual right, accustomed to treating the right with respect in spite of the fact that the right showed the center no such respect, accommodated itself to the right's continued rightward pull over and over again.
All of this moved the center, the discourse, and even the right further rightwards--quite predictably given the dynamic discussed here, which would seem to, in the absence of a strong left, make the center's rightward shift, and even what some have called the "normalization" of the more extreme right, a default mode for a centrist-dominated politics. Moreover, this has been reinforced by the extent to which the center hastened upon the hugely unpopular course of abandoning its old function of securing social concessions in its rush to embrace neoliberalism, and an ascent of "status politics" inseparable from the weakening of the left, producing discontents which the right (even if itself even more staunchly neoliberal than the center) exploited through appeals against which a center with little emotional appeal to a broad public had few defenses, and little ability to compete. This disadvantaged a center that responded by accommodating itself to the right that much more--with this pattern exacerbated by the combination of crisis, anemic growth, repeated government combination of rescue of the financial sector with austerity for the public so much seen since 2007, and the absolute determination of centrists to stick by their more fundamental policies in spite of all the opprobrium that had come to be attached to them.
Considering all this as it has played out in American history over the twentieth and twenty-first century (as the Democratic Party of the New Deal gave way to the Democratic Party of the Neo-Liberals in the Clinton era, etc.) my first thought was that it was mainly relevant to a United States unique because of the extent to which American politics was defined by Cold War Anti-Communism, and the marginalization of the left, to a greater degree than in any other major Western country (such that what is called here "centrism" is what has passed for "liberalism" in America). However, I soon enough saw how some of these dynamics were operative in British politics. More recently reading political scientist Aurelien Mondon's discussion of the rightward trajectory of French politics it seems to me fairly clear that this same tendency of an ostensibly in the middle but actually deeply conservative center to come down hardest on the left and accommodate the right, pushing a country's politics in a rightward direction, has been operative there as well, with the consequences already seen, and now anticipated from the election for the country's National Assembly.
Friday, June 28, 2024
Boxoffice Pro Publishes its First Forecast for Deadpool & Wolverine: Thoughts
Two weeks ago there were reports that the upcoming Deadpool & Wolverine was headed for a $200 million+ opening weekend. Extraordinary even by pre-pandemic standards those numbers caused a lot of excitement in the press.
Naturally I looked forward to the first estimate from Boxoffice Pro with more than the usual interest. Would those early estimates prove to have been exaggerated by the enthusiasm of devoted fans who distorted the earlier tracking, or indicative of very strong interest in the movie being so widespread as the tracking claimed?
As it happened Boxoffice Pro's estimate, if not quite as ebullient as the $200-$239 million so recently circulated, comes pretty close--their estimate some $175-$200 million, so that, yes, this will probably be the year's biggest opening up to at least that point. Meanwhile, going by a not unreasonable multiplier of 5-6 for the final global gross, the $1 billion mark definitely within reach, and the movie likely end up the franchise's biggest earner not just in current dollars but real terms as well.
I am sure many expected this all along--even if this could hardly have been extrapolated from the hard commercial data of the movie's predecessors, and the state of the market in 2023-2024. After all, the second Deadpool film made less than the first, all as the X-Men franchise is itself far along a path of diminishing returns with its second adaptation of the Dark Phoenix saga, all as superhero movies especially and franchise spectacles like these generally have been falling flat with audiences, etc., etc.--all of which led me just a few months ago to suggest the film's possibly failing to hit the half billion dollar mark (and even in April saw the "realistic" ceiling for the film as about $700 million).
Still, if in the past year or so my use of extrapolations from how prior films in a series and other similar films have done have tended to produce overestimates of the grosses of major films--as it did The Flash, and Indiana Jones 5, and Mission: Impossible 7, and Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2, this may be a case of the extrapolative approach producing a significant underestimation, and in a very welcome way from the standpoint not just of fans of Deadpool and Wolverine and the superhero genre, but Marvel, Disney and the American film industry as their claqueurs in the entertainment press will surely let us know should the box office bear out these expectations.
Naturally I looked forward to the first estimate from Boxoffice Pro with more than the usual interest. Would those early estimates prove to have been exaggerated by the enthusiasm of devoted fans who distorted the earlier tracking, or indicative of very strong interest in the movie being so widespread as the tracking claimed?
As it happened Boxoffice Pro's estimate, if not quite as ebullient as the $200-$239 million so recently circulated, comes pretty close--their estimate some $175-$200 million, so that, yes, this will probably be the year's biggest opening up to at least that point. Meanwhile, going by a not unreasonable multiplier of 5-6 for the final global gross, the $1 billion mark definitely within reach, and the movie likely end up the franchise's biggest earner not just in current dollars but real terms as well.
I am sure many expected this all along--even if this could hardly have been extrapolated from the hard commercial data of the movie's predecessors, and the state of the market in 2023-2024. After all, the second Deadpool film made less than the first, all as the X-Men franchise is itself far along a path of diminishing returns with its second adaptation of the Dark Phoenix saga, all as superhero movies especially and franchise spectacles like these generally have been falling flat with audiences, etc., etc.--all of which led me just a few months ago to suggest the film's possibly failing to hit the half billion dollar mark (and even in April saw the "realistic" ceiling for the film as about $700 million).
Still, if in the past year or so my use of extrapolations from how prior films in a series and other similar films have done have tended to produce overestimates of the grosses of major films--as it did The Flash, and Indiana Jones 5, and Mission: Impossible 7, and Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2, this may be a case of the extrapolative approach producing a significant underestimation, and in a very welcome way from the standpoint not just of fans of Deadpool and Wolverine and the superhero genre, but Marvel, Disney and the American film industry as their claqueurs in the entertainment press will surely let us know should the box office bear out these expectations.
The Taboo Against Artists Admitting They Want to be Rich and Famous
In Money Writes! Upton Sinclair acknowledges the desire to "get rich and famous" as a deciding factor in the desire of many persons to become artists. This is not some unheard-of idea, of course, but it is less acknowledged than it ought to be--while when people do acknowledge it they tend to do so with a sneer, not only at the longshot nature of such a hope, but the desire itself, which is seen as somehow unworthy. What makes Sinclair's treatment of the theme different is that, even though it is possible that no one has written more, and more knowingly, about what the sacrifice of art to the pursuit of "success" means for artists and their art and the society they live in, he writes of such persons with sympathy. After all, there is the alternative, the life as a "nobody" that those who hope to become rich and famous as writers, or any other sort of artist, hope to escape.
Why is acknowledgment of something that "everybody knows" so rare? And this the case in a society where the essence of conformity to received values is striving for individual economic advancement--the "American Dream"--such that by that standard endeavoring to get rich as an artist ought to be as respectable a way of pursuing that dream as any other?
I suppose one reason is what Sinclair had what most commentators on the matter do not--appreciation of how cruel society is to nobodies, such that their attempting to become somebodies by a longshot is understandable, and esteem for art as a worthy vocation, both of which they lack. Indeed, it seems that the desire to advance oneself for this particular reason and in this particular way falls afoul of a great many prevailing cultural standards. The conventional preach aspirationalism all the time--but they do not respect those to whom they preach it, the respect for the rich going with a disrespectful and unsympathetic attitude toward the poor and their sufferings and their natural desire to escape them. (Thus does aspirationalist preaching always have the ring of "Perhaps this will have a humanising effect on the dog-stealers" about it.)
Here the attitude of the economic "Calvinist" toward wealth seems relevant--respectful of wealth, disrespectful of the actual enjoyment of wealth. Those aspiring to be somebodies this way--to become "celebrities"--are all too obviously after the perks and pleasures of such advancement, while the conventional overlook how those wearing the business suits may be no less motivated by those perks and pleasures, their desire to get rich quick from work of uncertain value rather than steady, patient, toil at "real" work, and the fantasies of self-indulgence driving it, getting a pass. (The business suit, the perceived tedium of the office, the respect for finance in an era in which old-fashioned producerist suspicion of the usurer and speculator has fallen by the wayside buys the "wolves of Wall Street" the benefit of the doubt as against "frivolous" art, such that only a Balzac or a Marx pays the seamier reality heed.)
By contrast the artist gets the full blast of their moralizing, which in its way gives away something more important--namely, what the aspirationalism is really about. That whole mentality has nothing to do with desiring that the lower orders make the most of their chance to "get ahead," and everything to do with their encouraging those lower orders to make themselves as useful as possible to those who are already ahead. A person discontented with their lot hoping to change it by drawing back from the job market and working on their art does business no good, certainly not as against those who uncomplainingly, diligently toil at an eight-to-six--what the missionaries of aspirationalism really want. Still less can they have those artists making any claims for society's support as they walk that other path. The result is that while, for all his criticism of the compromises of those who become "ruling-class artists" for the sake of living well, Sinclair appreciated that the artist needs support, the conventional wisdom, as John Kenneth Galbraith put it, holds that the "true" artist must resign themselves to being an "unworldly and monkish figure," cutting off that particular avenue of escape from the life of a deprived nobody in the process for anyone even pretending to be a genuine artist rather than just a good-for-nothing looking for "an easy life" in a culture that sees no one as having any right to even hope for that.
Why is acknowledgment of something that "everybody knows" so rare? And this the case in a society where the essence of conformity to received values is striving for individual economic advancement--the "American Dream"--such that by that standard endeavoring to get rich as an artist ought to be as respectable a way of pursuing that dream as any other?
I suppose one reason is what Sinclair had what most commentators on the matter do not--appreciation of how cruel society is to nobodies, such that their attempting to become somebodies by a longshot is understandable, and esteem for art as a worthy vocation, both of which they lack. Indeed, it seems that the desire to advance oneself for this particular reason and in this particular way falls afoul of a great many prevailing cultural standards. The conventional preach aspirationalism all the time--but they do not respect those to whom they preach it, the respect for the rich going with a disrespectful and unsympathetic attitude toward the poor and their sufferings and their natural desire to escape them. (Thus does aspirationalist preaching always have the ring of "Perhaps this will have a humanising effect on the dog-stealers" about it.)
Here the attitude of the economic "Calvinist" toward wealth seems relevant--respectful of wealth, disrespectful of the actual enjoyment of wealth. Those aspiring to be somebodies this way--to become "celebrities"--are all too obviously after the perks and pleasures of such advancement, while the conventional overlook how those wearing the business suits may be no less motivated by those perks and pleasures, their desire to get rich quick from work of uncertain value rather than steady, patient, toil at "real" work, and the fantasies of self-indulgence driving it, getting a pass. (The business suit, the perceived tedium of the office, the respect for finance in an era in which old-fashioned producerist suspicion of the usurer and speculator has fallen by the wayside buys the "wolves of Wall Street" the benefit of the doubt as against "frivolous" art, such that only a Balzac or a Marx pays the seamier reality heed.)
By contrast the artist gets the full blast of their moralizing, which in its way gives away something more important--namely, what the aspirationalism is really about. That whole mentality has nothing to do with desiring that the lower orders make the most of their chance to "get ahead," and everything to do with their encouraging those lower orders to make themselves as useful as possible to those who are already ahead. A person discontented with their lot hoping to change it by drawing back from the job market and working on their art does business no good, certainly not as against those who uncomplainingly, diligently toil at an eight-to-six--what the missionaries of aspirationalism really want. Still less can they have those artists making any claims for society's support as they walk that other path. The result is that while, for all his criticism of the compromises of those who become "ruling-class artists" for the sake of living well, Sinclair appreciated that the artist needs support, the conventional wisdom, as John Kenneth Galbraith put it, holds that the "true" artist must resign themselves to being an "unworldly and monkish figure," cutting off that particular avenue of escape from the life of a deprived nobody in the process for anyone even pretending to be a genuine artist rather than just a good-for-nothing looking for "an easy life" in a culture that sees no one as having any right to even hope for that.
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Review: Money Writes! by Upton Sinclair
In Mammonart (1925) Upton Sinclair threw down a comprehensive challenge to the received wisdom about the creation, content and valuation of art ("the six great lies"), and above all the extent to which artistic production and the standards of artistic criticism have been dominated by the requirements of ruling elites in "an economic interpretation" of the Western canon which in its early chapters presented a forceful essayistic argument for his position, then proceeded to a grand survey of that canon's writers and works from antiquity to the present day showing how this has been the case at every point. If the survey was uneven in places its selections of authors from differing periods and countries were nonetheless sufficiently balanced that Sinclair could say only so much about the literature of his own time and place, and one may add, the ways in which the age-old economic and social and political forces of which he wrote had shaped it. However, Sinclair did get to say his piece about both the writers of his time, and the conditions which produced them, in a book he published two years later Money Writes! (1927).
The last of the books in the Dead Hand sequence he published over the decade of 1917-1927, Money Writes! is also the shortest, and in contrast with the preceding Dead Hand books Sinclair produced on a foundation of journalistic and scholarly research with an eye to comprehensive coverage of their subject matter (as with, besides Mammonart, his studies of American education and the American press), the most personal--by which I mean that to a much greater degree than the others it derives from his personal experiences and personal observations as he takes up the questions "Just why do so many people want to be writers?" "What enables the aspirant to become 'successful,' as against what enables a writer to produce something of genuine artistic value?" and "What does it mean to walk one path against the other?"
As one who knows Sinclair at all might guess in this subsequent piece of "economic interpretation" his answer to these questions is bound up with the most fundamental aspects of the society in which he lived. For Sinclair the most fundamental fact of American life was economic inequality that was not only extreme but continually rubbed in the faces of those who have least in a way utterly without historical precedent via its mass media. Especially given the combination of how American society treats the "nobodies" who are its vast majority, never missing a chance to add insult to the already scarcely tolerable injury of the have-not; its relentless aspirationalist propagandizing--telling the "nobody" that "You can do it too!" and become a "somebody," and enjoy all the perks of being a somebody, and that they ought to think of that rather than a more just order of affairs; and the way in which careers in the arts are so often presented as a pathway from being a nobody to being a somebody; the plain and simple reality is that such motives have much to do with a many a person's decision to become a writer, or any other sort of artist.
They also have much to do with what writers produce, for in contemporary America as much as at any other point in the millennia Sinclair surveyed in Mammonart artists are expected to propagandize for the powerful as their way of earning their keep and punished if they do not--by those who would pay or not pay them for their work, by the critics who act as the guardians of "respectable" opinion. As Sinclair put it in a chapter allusively titled "Incense to Mammon," the artist can write about anything he likes across the whole of space and time and variety of life, but the sin qua non is that "they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view." Thus the artist must glorify riches, and those who have them, and never say anything that might call into question the status quo. Where all this was concerned the path seemed to him even narrower than it had been just a few years earlier, for the 1920s was not just a period of media consolidation and ultra-commercialism carrying further the trend he described in The Brass Check, but as the aftermath of World War I and the Red Scare in the wake of the Russian Revolution, an era of ferocious reaction.
Considering what this means for writers Sinclair reiterates the view he had expressed in Mammonart that artists, being sensitive, are susceptible to propaganda, propaganda for orthodoxy included. (Indeed, Sinclair phrases himself even more strongly here, declaring "[t]he average author" to be "fundamentally . . . a naive and trusting creature--half a child, or the make-believe impulse would not survive in him," with the result that "he believes what the grown-ups tell him, and is impressed by the princes of real life, just as by those in the fairy-tales.") Tending to make them conservative this means that "a great many" of them "do not have to be purchased, but serve privilege gladly and with spontaneous awe." Yet if many writers have no problem falling in line and doing what is expected of them this way, the disparities between the official line they are expected to promote and lived reality is such that what they produce can only be flimsy stuff, with those not so readily or completely falling into line finding themselves in a most awkward situation. Especially in the less free atmosphere prevailing after the war, Sinclair noted, many of these flew from the dilemma posed by knowledge of existing social realities and the obligations they impose on the artist into pessimism ("a symptom of . . . moral break-down," "decay," death, with the pessimism of capitalist art reflecting that "capitalism," since become "the negation of morality in social affairs," was itself dying), or psycho-babble (an age not of Freud, but of Freudians, as Sinclair says, followers of Freud "who pervert his doctrine in spite of all he can do"), or sheer muddle (indeed, "muddlement . . . the ideal of our intellectuals," precisely because anyone who grasps "economic inequality as a cause of social and individual degeneration is permitted to hold any responsible post in capitalist society"). The work resulting from this is likewise of little value, with the obscurity of style to which authors taking these tacks tend only underlining the lack of substance rather than concealing it. And it seems to Sinclair that all this has faced the artist with another dilemma, to, if given the chance to do so, "do well," with any artist of sincerity and intelligence knowing something of what the world really is but opting for the above approaches casting aside their real duty to humanity, squandering their potential, and destroying their souls and their bodies in the process--the cynicism of their course leading to dissolution, artistically and physically. Alternatively sticking to their principles as artists they, in trying to "do good," find themselves walking a path of hardships along which, if ever finding the chance to publish at all, they find themselves shut out of those "platforms" that can make a career, ignored or maligned by critics, and banned in censorious places like Boston, as they pay their bills by "selling insurance or digging the ground," or perhaps "teaching at a country school," which can be no less destructive. (The fate of the "talent that is lonely and without group support," Sinclair notes, tends to be tragic in a variety of ways.)
Along with laying out the big picture of American society and what it means for Art and the Artist in the very best of his vivid and forceful fashion Sinclair, once again, shows what this has meant for individual writers and their individual works as he speaks his piece about some he did discuss in Mammonart (as with Jack London), and many he did not. Of some of those he writes of he does not think very much--like Booth Tarkington, a "'diehard' Tory" who, after "for a generation . . . interpret[ing] the well-to-do classes of the middle west, and mak[ing] them gracious and charming," turned into what would today be considered a right-wing troll with his 1927 novel The Plutocrat.* In figures like Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill he saw extraordinary talents whose work was limited, even mutilated, in important, unfortunate, ways all too telling of the times. (The great "proletarian playwright" O'Neill, even at this early stage in his career, had grown pessimistic--indeed, the chapter on him the occasion for Sinclair's principal discourse on the subject. The "great-hearted," "clear-sighted," stubbornly "truth-telling" Dreiser also seemed to Sinclair to lack a grasp of the social forces that drove his characters, so much so that Sinclair could imagine one reading An American Tragedy and getting from it nothing more than a "Sunday sermon" teaching that "the wages of sin is death.") This is even more the case with those whose earlier work could seem an indictment of their later production, as in his comparison of the pre-war with the post-war Edith Wharton, or what he says of Sherwood Anderson (the chapter about whom is actually entitled "Muddle," for he seems to Sinclair to embody "muddle" more than anyone else). Those for whom he actually had the most sympathy, it seemed, were the ones of whom we were least likely to have heard of at all, like Gerald Lively, from whose poems in Songs of a Soil Slave Sinclair quotes some extraordinary verse.
It seemed to me that the judgments Sinclair made in this work he will not greatly surprise anyone who read Mammonart. Still, because of the structure and approach of the book Sinclair's personal quirks were more prominent--as with his Puritan streak. A supporter of Prohibition who had seen alcohol destroy many a talented author, he let us know it at such length that I became impatient with his singing about "Mister Booze." Even as one finding less and less value in the irrational and the backward-looking and the obscure, and sympathizing greatly with his critical stance toward such work, Sinclair's impatience with it could seem excessive. Even in his appraisals of particular authors he cited favorably he could appear to me wrong-headed. The example that most quickly leaps to mind I strongly disagree with his view of Dreiser as lacking a grasp of social forces, it seeming to me that just such a grasp was why, as David Walsh put it, his most famous book "presented more clearly" than any work before or since "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society."
Still, all these seem to me to be comparative quibbles. Sinclair's larger vision of the realities of the America of his time (which, for all his hopes, expectations and efforts is essentially the America of our own time) is indisputable, economic inequality then as it is now the defining fact of societal life, and manifest in the culture in the same ways, with the same implications and temptations and dangers for those who would embark on an artistic career, all as the 1920s can seem an era of artistic freedom for those of the views toward which he was sympathetic compared with the 2020s. (If Sinclair appreciated him less fully than he ought to have done, his era, after all, did produce a Dreiser--all as Sinclair plugged away. What figure of comparable stature today would you compare with either?) Certainly Sinclair's appraisal of the essential naiveté of artists, and the way those forced to "wise up" a bit fly from social realities into a pessimism, psycho-babble and muddle wrapped up in obscurity of style, seems to me a perfect characterization not just of the source and substance of the Modernism of his time, but the continued worship of that Modernism in the century since, reinforced by "cultural Cold War," by the eventual succession of Modernism by postmodernism. (Sinclair tells us that he "ridicule[d]" James Joyce, but at century's end the Modern Library ranked his Ulysses the best English-language novel of the twentieth century to no controversy whatsoever, this no more and no less than what "everyone" expected given that the standards Sinclair and others like him fought against endured.)
Indeed, Sinclair's individual judgments are also far more often right than wrong (as they seemed to be to as he ranged from the essential immaturity of mind of Rudyard Kipling, to the Tory-turned-Troll quality of Tarkington, to the essential meaninglessness of H.L. Mencken's smug cynicism, and much, much else), while Sinclair's ear for poetry particularly impressed me--reflected in how those whose advocacy he took up certainly merit rescuing from the obscurity in which they stand today. (How telling it is of the deranged character of the last century's critical standards that the piffle of a T.S. Eliot should be regarded as the supreme accomplishment of English poetry in his century while a talent such as Lively remains unrecognized!)
Amid it all what Sinclair had to say about not just the artist's works, but the artist's life, rings true again and again, from his telling of his own experience of the slush pile in his youth, to the sad ends to which so many of the writers he discusses came, while knowing why they came to such ends. (In his remarks about both the way the desire to be a "somebody" is the prime mover of many a literary career, and the tragic fate of the unsupported talent Sinclair only says what is obvious to any intelligent person but only very rarely acknowledged in a society preferring stupid clichés instead.) Indeed, when reading this book's earliest chapters I was sure that Money Writes! would rank with Balzac's Lost Illusions and Jack London's Martin Eden as one of those very, very few books which tells the truth about what it really is to be a writer in their time, and in our own time--and as I turned the last page on what is not only the briefest but briskest and most entertaining of Sinclair's Dead Hand books, I regarded myself as having only been confirmed in that judgment.
* As Sinclair put it "the girding of the 'reds'" drove Tarkington "into a sort of 'To hell with you' mood" that had him make a hero out of a virtual caricature of arrogant, trustified wealth acting "the ugly American" during a trip abroad in that book (all of which the press received very favorably indeed).
The last of the books in the Dead Hand sequence he published over the decade of 1917-1927, Money Writes! is also the shortest, and in contrast with the preceding Dead Hand books Sinclair produced on a foundation of journalistic and scholarly research with an eye to comprehensive coverage of their subject matter (as with, besides Mammonart, his studies of American education and the American press), the most personal--by which I mean that to a much greater degree than the others it derives from his personal experiences and personal observations as he takes up the questions "Just why do so many people want to be writers?" "What enables the aspirant to become 'successful,' as against what enables a writer to produce something of genuine artistic value?" and "What does it mean to walk one path against the other?"
As one who knows Sinclair at all might guess in this subsequent piece of "economic interpretation" his answer to these questions is bound up with the most fundamental aspects of the society in which he lived. For Sinclair the most fundamental fact of American life was economic inequality that was not only extreme but continually rubbed in the faces of those who have least in a way utterly without historical precedent via its mass media. Especially given the combination of how American society treats the "nobodies" who are its vast majority, never missing a chance to add insult to the already scarcely tolerable injury of the have-not; its relentless aspirationalist propagandizing--telling the "nobody" that "You can do it too!" and become a "somebody," and enjoy all the perks of being a somebody, and that they ought to think of that rather than a more just order of affairs; and the way in which careers in the arts are so often presented as a pathway from being a nobody to being a somebody; the plain and simple reality is that such motives have much to do with a many a person's decision to become a writer, or any other sort of artist.
They also have much to do with what writers produce, for in contemporary America as much as at any other point in the millennia Sinclair surveyed in Mammonart artists are expected to propagandize for the powerful as their way of earning their keep and punished if they do not--by those who would pay or not pay them for their work, by the critics who act as the guardians of "respectable" opinion. As Sinclair put it in a chapter allusively titled "Incense to Mammon," the artist can write about anything he likes across the whole of space and time and variety of life, but the sin qua non is that "they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view." Thus the artist must glorify riches, and those who have them, and never say anything that might call into question the status quo. Where all this was concerned the path seemed to him even narrower than it had been just a few years earlier, for the 1920s was not just a period of media consolidation and ultra-commercialism carrying further the trend he described in The Brass Check, but as the aftermath of World War I and the Red Scare in the wake of the Russian Revolution, an era of ferocious reaction.
Considering what this means for writers Sinclair reiterates the view he had expressed in Mammonart that artists, being sensitive, are susceptible to propaganda, propaganda for orthodoxy included. (Indeed, Sinclair phrases himself even more strongly here, declaring "[t]he average author" to be "fundamentally . . . a naive and trusting creature--half a child, or the make-believe impulse would not survive in him," with the result that "he believes what the grown-ups tell him, and is impressed by the princes of real life, just as by those in the fairy-tales.") Tending to make them conservative this means that "a great many" of them "do not have to be purchased, but serve privilege gladly and with spontaneous awe." Yet if many writers have no problem falling in line and doing what is expected of them this way, the disparities between the official line they are expected to promote and lived reality is such that what they produce can only be flimsy stuff, with those not so readily or completely falling into line finding themselves in a most awkward situation. Especially in the less free atmosphere prevailing after the war, Sinclair noted, many of these flew from the dilemma posed by knowledge of existing social realities and the obligations they impose on the artist into pessimism ("a symptom of . . . moral break-down," "decay," death, with the pessimism of capitalist art reflecting that "capitalism," since become "the negation of morality in social affairs," was itself dying), or psycho-babble (an age not of Freud, but of Freudians, as Sinclair says, followers of Freud "who pervert his doctrine in spite of all he can do"), or sheer muddle (indeed, "muddlement . . . the ideal of our intellectuals," precisely because anyone who grasps "economic inequality as a cause of social and individual degeneration is permitted to hold any responsible post in capitalist society"). The work resulting from this is likewise of little value, with the obscurity of style to which authors taking these tacks tend only underlining the lack of substance rather than concealing it. And it seems to Sinclair that all this has faced the artist with another dilemma, to, if given the chance to do so, "do well," with any artist of sincerity and intelligence knowing something of what the world really is but opting for the above approaches casting aside their real duty to humanity, squandering their potential, and destroying their souls and their bodies in the process--the cynicism of their course leading to dissolution, artistically and physically. Alternatively sticking to their principles as artists they, in trying to "do good," find themselves walking a path of hardships along which, if ever finding the chance to publish at all, they find themselves shut out of those "platforms" that can make a career, ignored or maligned by critics, and banned in censorious places like Boston, as they pay their bills by "selling insurance or digging the ground," or perhaps "teaching at a country school," which can be no less destructive. (The fate of the "talent that is lonely and without group support," Sinclair notes, tends to be tragic in a variety of ways.)
Along with laying out the big picture of American society and what it means for Art and the Artist in the very best of his vivid and forceful fashion Sinclair, once again, shows what this has meant for individual writers and their individual works as he speaks his piece about some he did discuss in Mammonart (as with Jack London), and many he did not. Of some of those he writes of he does not think very much--like Booth Tarkington, a "'diehard' Tory" who, after "for a generation . . . interpret[ing] the well-to-do classes of the middle west, and mak[ing] them gracious and charming," turned into what would today be considered a right-wing troll with his 1927 novel The Plutocrat.* In figures like Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill he saw extraordinary talents whose work was limited, even mutilated, in important, unfortunate, ways all too telling of the times. (The great "proletarian playwright" O'Neill, even at this early stage in his career, had grown pessimistic--indeed, the chapter on him the occasion for Sinclair's principal discourse on the subject. The "great-hearted," "clear-sighted," stubbornly "truth-telling" Dreiser also seemed to Sinclair to lack a grasp of the social forces that drove his characters, so much so that Sinclair could imagine one reading An American Tragedy and getting from it nothing more than a "Sunday sermon" teaching that "the wages of sin is death.") This is even more the case with those whose earlier work could seem an indictment of their later production, as in his comparison of the pre-war with the post-war Edith Wharton, or what he says of Sherwood Anderson (the chapter about whom is actually entitled "Muddle," for he seems to Sinclair to embody "muddle" more than anyone else). Those for whom he actually had the most sympathy, it seemed, were the ones of whom we were least likely to have heard of at all, like Gerald Lively, from whose poems in Songs of a Soil Slave Sinclair quotes some extraordinary verse.
It seemed to me that the judgments Sinclair made in this work he will not greatly surprise anyone who read Mammonart. Still, because of the structure and approach of the book Sinclair's personal quirks were more prominent--as with his Puritan streak. A supporter of Prohibition who had seen alcohol destroy many a talented author, he let us know it at such length that I became impatient with his singing about "Mister Booze." Even as one finding less and less value in the irrational and the backward-looking and the obscure, and sympathizing greatly with his critical stance toward such work, Sinclair's impatience with it could seem excessive. Even in his appraisals of particular authors he cited favorably he could appear to me wrong-headed. The example that most quickly leaps to mind I strongly disagree with his view of Dreiser as lacking a grasp of social forces, it seeming to me that just such a grasp was why, as David Walsh put it, his most famous book "presented more clearly" than any work before or since "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society."
Still, all these seem to me to be comparative quibbles. Sinclair's larger vision of the realities of the America of his time (which, for all his hopes, expectations and efforts is essentially the America of our own time) is indisputable, economic inequality then as it is now the defining fact of societal life, and manifest in the culture in the same ways, with the same implications and temptations and dangers for those who would embark on an artistic career, all as the 1920s can seem an era of artistic freedom for those of the views toward which he was sympathetic compared with the 2020s. (If Sinclair appreciated him less fully than he ought to have done, his era, after all, did produce a Dreiser--all as Sinclair plugged away. What figure of comparable stature today would you compare with either?) Certainly Sinclair's appraisal of the essential naiveté of artists, and the way those forced to "wise up" a bit fly from social realities into a pessimism, psycho-babble and muddle wrapped up in obscurity of style, seems to me a perfect characterization not just of the source and substance of the Modernism of his time, but the continued worship of that Modernism in the century since, reinforced by "cultural Cold War," by the eventual succession of Modernism by postmodernism. (Sinclair tells us that he "ridicule[d]" James Joyce, but at century's end the Modern Library ranked his Ulysses the best English-language novel of the twentieth century to no controversy whatsoever, this no more and no less than what "everyone" expected given that the standards Sinclair and others like him fought against endured.)
Indeed, Sinclair's individual judgments are also far more often right than wrong (as they seemed to be to as he ranged from the essential immaturity of mind of Rudyard Kipling, to the Tory-turned-Troll quality of Tarkington, to the essential meaninglessness of H.L. Mencken's smug cynicism, and much, much else), while Sinclair's ear for poetry particularly impressed me--reflected in how those whose advocacy he took up certainly merit rescuing from the obscurity in which they stand today. (How telling it is of the deranged character of the last century's critical standards that the piffle of a T.S. Eliot should be regarded as the supreme accomplishment of English poetry in his century while a talent such as Lively remains unrecognized!)
Amid it all what Sinclair had to say about not just the artist's works, but the artist's life, rings true again and again, from his telling of his own experience of the slush pile in his youth, to the sad ends to which so many of the writers he discusses came, while knowing why they came to such ends. (In his remarks about both the way the desire to be a "somebody" is the prime mover of many a literary career, and the tragic fate of the unsupported talent Sinclair only says what is obvious to any intelligent person but only very rarely acknowledged in a society preferring stupid clichés instead.) Indeed, when reading this book's earliest chapters I was sure that Money Writes! would rank with Balzac's Lost Illusions and Jack London's Martin Eden as one of those very, very few books which tells the truth about what it really is to be a writer in their time, and in our own time--and as I turned the last page on what is not only the briefest but briskest and most entertaining of Sinclair's Dead Hand books, I regarded myself as having only been confirmed in that judgment.
* As Sinclair put it "the girding of the 'reds'" drove Tarkington "into a sort of 'To hell with you' mood" that had him make a hero out of a virtual caricature of arrogant, trustified wealth acting "the ugly American" during a trip abroad in that book (all of which the press received very favorably indeed).
Inside Out 2's Second Weekend
Inside Out 2 opened well above Hollywood's already high expectations for the film. However, a still bigger surprise has been how the film held up over the following week, taking in another $100 million over the Monday to Thursday period, and another $100 million after that on the following weekend--the latter working out to a mere 34 percent drop from the first weekend to the second. Giving the movie $356 million after just ten days, and still rising fast, this meant the movie blowing far, far past my estimate of its floor ($240 million), and its more plausible ceiling ($330 million), on the way to all but certainly exceeding the highest end of the range I bothered to discuss ($440 million) some time this coming weekend. The film has also done similarly well overseas, more than matching its North American earnings, so that the same is probably going to prove the case with the international and global range (ten days in the movie taking in some $373 million internationally, for a global total north of $700 million+ and climbing fast).
Does this mean Pixar, Disney, the Hollywood blockbuster as we know them are back? Just as anyone paying attention ought to have expected the entertainment press is making the most of Inside Out 2's performance as evidence that they are. Perhaps they are right. But even if they prove to be so they seem to me to be "calling it" far too early. After the last four-and-a-half years, and the terrible last year-and-a-half especially, it will take more than one hit of that kind to show that, and those more interested in understanding the situation than claquing for a film industry absolutely determined to not abandon its lazy, crass, exhausted and recently seemingly failing standard operating procedures would do best to remember that it takes more than one hit to tell us how the market is really going, and show some circumspection about that for the time being.
Does this mean Pixar, Disney, the Hollywood blockbuster as we know them are back? Just as anyone paying attention ought to have expected the entertainment press is making the most of Inside Out 2's performance as evidence that they are. Perhaps they are right. But even if they prove to be so they seem to me to be "calling it" far too early. After the last four-and-a-half years, and the terrible last year-and-a-half especially, it will take more than one hit of that kind to show that, and those more interested in understanding the situation than claquing for a film industry absolutely determined to not abandon its lazy, crass, exhausted and recently seemingly failing standard operating procedures would do best to remember that it takes more than one hit to tell us how the market is really going, and show some circumspection about that for the time being.
Cordell Gascoigne Reviews Amazon's Fallout
The increasing fashionability of video game adaptations has been a factor not just on the big screen, where last year we got The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Five Nights at Freddy's, but on the small screen as well, where HBO's The Last of Us followed in the footsteps of The Walking Dead by similarly winning the kind of unhinged critical praise for a prestige TV show that The Sopranos made so customary.
Now Amazon has Fallout, which has also been praised in a comparable fashion. Is it relevant to such a reception that Fallout, like The Last of Us, is a post-apocalyptic drama wallowing in a grimdark, misanthropic view of the world? I would imagine so, the more for having read a less conventional take on the material from Cordell Gascoigne that, the more persuasive in as Gascoigne is less impressed with those things that make critics lose their critical faculties. He presents Fallout as a cliché-packed yet inconsistent narrative in the end carried by "gratuitous violence and shock value"--failings that seem to him characteristic not only of this series, but the "romancing the nuclear post-apocalypse" genre Paul Brians was already criticizing decades ago, and which stands in stark counterpoint to what he thought a far more substantial treatment of the dangers of the nuclear age in Oppenheimer. Indeed, Gascoigne does not overlook the fact that Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan directed three episodes of the show--regarding which someone sympathetic to Gascoigne's outlook may say that where Christopher Nolan rose above the level of his past works with Oppenheimer, Jonathan proved all too conventional in telling his much more pop-oriented tale in Fallout.
Now Amazon has Fallout, which has also been praised in a comparable fashion. Is it relevant to such a reception that Fallout, like The Last of Us, is a post-apocalyptic drama wallowing in a grimdark, misanthropic view of the world? I would imagine so, the more for having read a less conventional take on the material from Cordell Gascoigne that, the more persuasive in as Gascoigne is less impressed with those things that make critics lose their critical faculties. He presents Fallout as a cliché-packed yet inconsistent narrative in the end carried by "gratuitous violence and shock value"--failings that seem to him characteristic not only of this series, but the "romancing the nuclear post-apocalypse" genre Paul Brians was already criticizing decades ago, and which stands in stark counterpoint to what he thought a far more substantial treatment of the dangers of the nuclear age in Oppenheimer. Indeed, Gascoigne does not overlook the fact that Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan directed three episodes of the show--regarding which someone sympathetic to Gascoigne's outlook may say that where Christopher Nolan rose above the level of his past works with Oppenheimer, Jonathan proved all too conventional in telling his much more pop-oriented tale in Fallout.
Friday, June 21, 2024
Can Twisters be a Hit?
The movie Twisters is due out July 19.
I have to admit that, in spite of seeing it listed as one of those movies that Hollywood insiders are counting on to save the season, the year and Hollywood (like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine), I paid the movie little mind. After all, Twisters is a follow-up to a movie that was a hit way back in 1996, with nothing since come of it, giving me the impression of Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel for past hits it could rework (like Gladiator 2, also coming out this year). This is all the more the case given that the market for sequels selling brand-name action-adventure spectacle is not what it was even a couple of years ago (don't let the entertainment press' rah-rah make you forget how disastrous 2023, and so far, 2024 as well, have been for movies of the type), while disaster movies have not done well in quite some time (partly, I think, because the scaling up of the action movie, and especially the superhero movie, made pretty much every action movie a disaster movie in some degree).
Not wholly disregarding the above in its weighing of the movie's "pros" and "cons" Boxoffice Pro informs us that the backers of the film are counting on nostalgia and star power to sell the film--which seem to me to be a weak basis for expectations of success. After all, '90s nostalgia has been no match for '80s nostalgia as a hit-maker--all as, I think, the original Twister has little cachet as a distinctly '90s moment. (People may remember the bit with the cow being carried across the road by the tornado's winds--but does this memory scream "'90s" to them the way other things might?) Meanwhile star power has been fickle in the best of times, and can seem all but nonexistent in the post-star twenty-first century, especially in the case of those younger actors who only became Names in this century. (The commentators may tell us that Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones are draws, but I am sure I was not the only one who had to look up who both those people were, while after checking out her IMDB page, I saw scant evidence for Ms. Edgar-Jones having a blockbuster-caliber draw in her credits to date.)
Indeed, rather than the movie playing like that other nostalgia-star power blend Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters seemed to me more comparable to that other belated sequel to a disaster movie hit of 1996, Independence Day: Resurgence, which fell flat at the box office (its gross scarcely a fifth of the original's in real terms)--the more in as Twisters lacks Top Gun 2's other advantages (namely the extreme weakness of the competition at the time of its release, for if 2024 is far from strong that way this movie has the misfortune of hitting theaters the week before Deadpool & Wolverine's possibly record-crushing debut; and the breathless cheer-leading of the media for the return of Tom Cruise to the skies in a Navy fighter).*
The result is that the magazine's prediction of a range of $65-$95 million was a surprise. If not particularly spectacular (compare it with the opening we have just seen for Inside Out 2, or what is projected for Deadpool & Wolverine), and leaves the movie a long way away from matching the original's gross in real, inflation-adjusted terms (even at the high end of the range it would have to quintuple its opening weekend gross to do that, a tall order indeed), it is still better than I expected--and in fact I remain skeptical, the more in as there are several weeks to go.* After all, last year we did see predictions for films crumble between the first projection and the opening weekend, and then the movie's actual opening weekend performance actually prove weaker than the bottom end of the last range indicated. (Thus did Boxoffice Pro's projection for The Flash fall from $115-$140 million to $60-$80 million over those few weeks, and the film actually take in just $55 million over the three-day period.) There is as yet no reason to think Twisters will suffer that, certainly in the absence of the idiocies that surrounded the promotion of those films that suffered that fate last year (as The Flash did), while some films do see their prospects rise greatly over the same time frame (as Oppenheimer and especially Barbie did, with their performance beating even the elevated expectations for both). Still, the point is that this prediction seems uncertain, enough so that I am not going to bother venturing any estimates--though I will be looking to the updates with interest.
* The original Independence Day made $306 million in 1996--equal to $468 million in 2016, when the sequel came out. Resurgence, however, made just $103 million domestically, which is why, contrary to the promise at the movie's conclusion, we have yet to see an Independence Day 3 (though don't rule that out yet given how desperate Hollywood is to crank out more sequels these days).
** Twister's domestic gross of just under $242 million back in 1996 is equal to $485 million in today's terms--a doubling corresponding to the rise in the budget. (Where the first Twister's production cost was an estimated $92 million, the figure for the new film is $200 million--before one gets into the non-production costs that have probably risen by an even greater margin.)
I have to admit that, in spite of seeing it listed as one of those movies that Hollywood insiders are counting on to save the season, the year and Hollywood (like Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine), I paid the movie little mind. After all, Twisters is a follow-up to a movie that was a hit way back in 1996, with nothing since come of it, giving me the impression of Hollywood scraping the bottom of the barrel for past hits it could rework (like Gladiator 2, also coming out this year). This is all the more the case given that the market for sequels selling brand-name action-adventure spectacle is not what it was even a couple of years ago (don't let the entertainment press' rah-rah make you forget how disastrous 2023, and so far, 2024 as well, have been for movies of the type), while disaster movies have not done well in quite some time (partly, I think, because the scaling up of the action movie, and especially the superhero movie, made pretty much every action movie a disaster movie in some degree).
Not wholly disregarding the above in its weighing of the movie's "pros" and "cons" Boxoffice Pro informs us that the backers of the film are counting on nostalgia and star power to sell the film--which seem to me to be a weak basis for expectations of success. After all, '90s nostalgia has been no match for '80s nostalgia as a hit-maker--all as, I think, the original Twister has little cachet as a distinctly '90s moment. (People may remember the bit with the cow being carried across the road by the tornado's winds--but does this memory scream "'90s" to them the way other things might?) Meanwhile star power has been fickle in the best of times, and can seem all but nonexistent in the post-star twenty-first century, especially in the case of those younger actors who only became Names in this century. (The commentators may tell us that Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones are draws, but I am sure I was not the only one who had to look up who both those people were, while after checking out her IMDB page, I saw scant evidence for Ms. Edgar-Jones having a blockbuster-caliber draw in her credits to date.)
Indeed, rather than the movie playing like that other nostalgia-star power blend Top Gun: Maverick, Twisters seemed to me more comparable to that other belated sequel to a disaster movie hit of 1996, Independence Day: Resurgence, which fell flat at the box office (its gross scarcely a fifth of the original's in real terms)--the more in as Twisters lacks Top Gun 2's other advantages (namely the extreme weakness of the competition at the time of its release, for if 2024 is far from strong that way this movie has the misfortune of hitting theaters the week before Deadpool & Wolverine's possibly record-crushing debut; and the breathless cheer-leading of the media for the return of Tom Cruise to the skies in a Navy fighter).*
The result is that the magazine's prediction of a range of $65-$95 million was a surprise. If not particularly spectacular (compare it with the opening we have just seen for Inside Out 2, or what is projected for Deadpool & Wolverine), and leaves the movie a long way away from matching the original's gross in real, inflation-adjusted terms (even at the high end of the range it would have to quintuple its opening weekend gross to do that, a tall order indeed), it is still better than I expected--and in fact I remain skeptical, the more in as there are several weeks to go.* After all, last year we did see predictions for films crumble between the first projection and the opening weekend, and then the movie's actual opening weekend performance actually prove weaker than the bottom end of the last range indicated. (Thus did Boxoffice Pro's projection for The Flash fall from $115-$140 million to $60-$80 million over those few weeks, and the film actually take in just $55 million over the three-day period.) There is as yet no reason to think Twisters will suffer that, certainly in the absence of the idiocies that surrounded the promotion of those films that suffered that fate last year (as The Flash did), while some films do see their prospects rise greatly over the same time frame (as Oppenheimer and especially Barbie did, with their performance beating even the elevated expectations for both). Still, the point is that this prediction seems uncertain, enough so that I am not going to bother venturing any estimates--though I will be looking to the updates with interest.
* The original Independence Day made $306 million in 1996--equal to $468 million in 2016, when the sequel came out. Resurgence, however, made just $103 million domestically, which is why, contrary to the promise at the movie's conclusion, we have yet to see an Independence Day 3 (though don't rule that out yet given how desperate Hollywood is to crank out more sequels these days).
** Twister's domestic gross of just under $242 million back in 1996 is equal to $485 million in today's terms--a doubling corresponding to the rise in the budget. (Where the first Twister's production cost was an estimated $92 million, the figure for the new film is $200 million--before one gets into the non-production costs that have probably risen by an even greater margin.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
