A few weeks ago reports of a likely $200 million opening for Deadpool & Wolverine got the entertainment press talking--that kind of thing still very impressive for an R-rated movie even pre-pandemic, and that much more spectacular now. Subsequently Boxoffice Pro's first long-range forecast confirmed the expectation (more or less), and has since reaffirmed it in the two updates the site has published since (the last one as of the time of this writing still projecting $180 million-$200 million for the debut).
In contrast with the way the estimates crumple in the weeks before opening for so many movies (most spectacularly, in the case of the ballyhooed The Flash back in June 2023, as expectations of a $115-$140 million opening already thought disappointing in light of the hype fell to one of $60-$80 million that itself proved overoptimistic), the expectations for the third Deadpool movie (and kajillionith Wolverine movie) are holding up, with very little way left to go.
The result is that, barring a profound upset at the last minute, the question is not whether the movie will open big (even a significant drop from the $200 million figure would still be reason for those cheerleading for Deadpool's success to feel good), but how the film's legs will hold up. Will this be a case of the interested all coming out at the outset and the movie's revenue falling hard in the coming weeks, or will the movie get a good multiplier for that debut? And, moving beyond the undeniable North American interest in the movie, will this movie do as well internationally, and so give Disney-Marvel something to really celebrate?
One way or the other we will learn the answers to those more difficult questions over the next month.
Tuesday, July 16, 2024
The Box Office Prospects of It Ends With Us: Some Thoughts
As Ryan Reynolds stars in what may be the biggest movie of the summer, the year and his career, his wife will also have a film hitting theaters--a big-screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us.
Why bring it up when I rarely consider the box office chances of movies that are not big splashy sequels to comic book superhero films and the like? From a box office point of view this movie interests me for two reasons:
1. Where adaptations of bestselling books--and not just young adult books or adaptations of children's classics but recent bestsellers for grown-up readers--used to regularly become blockbusters substantially on the basis of readers' interest in them, this has become less common these past many years, with adaptations of publishing sensations in fact tending to be commercial disappointments, as happened with Where the Crawdads Sing and Killers of the Flower Moon. I suspect this is partly because books are mattering less in people's lives (that books become bestsellers after selling fewer copies as the market shrinks, that people less often read the books they buy, that those books they read leave less impression on them, etc.), and partly because what people look for in those movies they go to the theater for increasingly diverge from what they are prepared to enjoy in their books (or on the small screen) when they bother to go to the theater at all. The result is that looking at this movie I wonder whether it will buck the trend, or confirm it.
2. In Deadline's list of the most profitable films of 2023 we saw an unusually high share of smaller and lower grossing films. These movies succeeded not by selling the most tickets through appeal to the widest audience, but the combination of the existence of a limited part of the audience whose interest was high, with low costs. Thus did such movies as Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film beat Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in absolute profit, never mind relative return (the net on Taylor Swift's movie twice the total expense, as against a little over a fifth of its expenses with Guardians), all as, with a little help from marketing revenue, the PAW Patrol and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made the cut as well (the latter movie actually taking the #4 spot!). The result is that if It Ends With Us looks small next to a Deadpool it might find its way to success by that path--with the trajectory of Where the Crawdads Sing suggestive. Where that movie took in a mere $140 million worldwide at the box office (gross, not net), the combination of that figure with the limited outlay for production and promotion made it not just profitable, but translated to a very respectable cash-on-cash return that did not get it on the main list of profit-makers, but did get it on the accompanying list of what one might call "honorable mentions" for lower-budgeted movies. For now Boxoffice Pro forecasts a $20-$30 million opening for It Ends With Us, but for all that it might well end up on Deadline's honorable mention list come next spring--or even better still should the big movies continue to falter as they have done so often this past year and a half. Indeed, it would be all too symbolic of the trend were It Ends With Us to rank higher on Deadline's list than Deadpool come next spring.
Why bring it up when I rarely consider the box office chances of movies that are not big splashy sequels to comic book superhero films and the like? From a box office point of view this movie interests me for two reasons:
1. Where adaptations of bestselling books--and not just young adult books or adaptations of children's classics but recent bestsellers for grown-up readers--used to regularly become blockbusters substantially on the basis of readers' interest in them, this has become less common these past many years, with adaptations of publishing sensations in fact tending to be commercial disappointments, as happened with Where the Crawdads Sing and Killers of the Flower Moon. I suspect this is partly because books are mattering less in people's lives (that books become bestsellers after selling fewer copies as the market shrinks, that people less often read the books they buy, that those books they read leave less impression on them, etc.), and partly because what people look for in those movies they go to the theater for increasingly diverge from what they are prepared to enjoy in their books (or on the small screen) when they bother to go to the theater at all. The result is that looking at this movie I wonder whether it will buck the trend, or confirm it.
2. In Deadline's list of the most profitable films of 2023 we saw an unusually high share of smaller and lower grossing films. These movies succeeded not by selling the most tickets through appeal to the widest audience, but the combination of the existence of a limited part of the audience whose interest was high, with low costs. Thus did such movies as Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift's concert film beat Guardians of the Galaxy 3 in absolute profit, never mind relative return (the net on Taylor Swift's movie twice the total expense, as against a little over a fifth of its expenses with Guardians), all as, with a little help from marketing revenue, the PAW Patrol and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made the cut as well (the latter movie actually taking the #4 spot!). The result is that if It Ends With Us looks small next to a Deadpool it might find its way to success by that path--with the trajectory of Where the Crawdads Sing suggestive. Where that movie took in a mere $140 million worldwide at the box office (gross, not net), the combination of that figure with the limited outlay for production and promotion made it not just profitable, but translated to a very respectable cash-on-cash return that did not get it on the main list of profit-makers, but did get it on the accompanying list of what one might call "honorable mentions" for lower-budgeted movies. For now Boxoffice Pro forecasts a $20-$30 million opening for It Ends With Us, but for all that it might well end up on Deadline's honorable mention list come next spring--or even better still should the big movies continue to falter as they have done so often this past year and a half. Indeed, it would be all too symbolic of the trend were It Ends With Us to rank higher on Deadline's list than Deadpool come next spring.
Is Bad Boys 4 a Hit or a Flop?
Back in 2020 Bad Boys 3 (Bad Boys for Life) came out in the dump month of January and proved a comparative success, grossing $206 million domestically and $426 million globally. The global figure actually compared favorably with that of the preceding film in the saga, 2003's Bad Boys 2, even after adjustment for inflation (the equivalent of about $520 million versus $470 million in June 2024 dollars), all as the newer film scored its gross on a much lower budget. (Made for $90 million, this may have been just half of the $130 million that went into Bad Boys 2 when we adjust for inflation.)
Such success made Bad Boys 3 the highest-grossing film of 2020 (if only because pretty much every other major movie was deprived of its chance by the pandemic), and probably let it turn a very respectable profit. (There was no Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament in 2020 because of the exceptional circumstances, but I could picture the movie netting $100 million+ very easily on the basis of the numbers, not something that $90 million action movies do much these days.*) This likely made a sequel inevitable, with, just like the gambling on summer by the backers of The Fall Guy, the studio probably hoping to do better still with a June release than one in January, the more in as this summer's competition was not terribly strong in that patch.
How did it go?
Domestically Bad Boys 3 opened to $63 million domestically, or $77 million in June 2024 terms. The "multiplier" for the opening weekend was about 3.3--the movie more than tripling that opening gross over its fuller run.
By contrast Bad Boys 4 (Bad Boys: Ride or Die) had a weaker opening--debuting to $57 million, or about a quarter down in real terms. The movie has also not had better legs, with its take as of five weeks of play about $181 million--or about 73 percent of the former film's gross in June 2024 terms ($250 million or so).
Meanwhile, the international market, once again, did not come to the rescue. Bad Boys 3 made 48 percent of its money domestically, 52 percent internationally, while the fourth film has had a rough 50/50 split so far, leaving it with about $365 million globally--against that aforementioned $520 million or so. The result is that without much further to go the new movie has taken in just 70 percent of what its predecessor did--a significant drop rather than a significant improvement, suggestive of the obsession of Hollywood with running every success straight into the ground and beyond. Still, if the makers of the film really did keep the production budget down to $100 million (in real terms, a smaller budget than the $90 million budget of Bad Boys 3 four and a half inflationary years ago) it is possible, even probable, that this sequel will in the end eke out a profit as well--though especially given the cost of promotion of the film in the summer season, and the claims the stars may have on the film's revenue (plausibly, part of how the budget was held down), likely not one so great that the Suits will rush to green-light a Bad Boys 5 if they have any brains at all. Alas, one is far more likely to lose than win betting on that, the more in as the unhinged sequel-nobody-asked-for-mongers grow only more desperate all the time.
* Taking the $90 million production budget, and estimating from that a final outlay in the $200 million or at most $300 million range when everything is added in; and weighing that against the movie's making $200 million net at the box office and likely matching that in home entertainment, etc. for a total net revenue of $400 million; and we get a $100 million profit (or maybe much more).
Such success made Bad Boys 3 the highest-grossing film of 2020 (if only because pretty much every other major movie was deprived of its chance by the pandemic), and probably let it turn a very respectable profit. (There was no Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament in 2020 because of the exceptional circumstances, but I could picture the movie netting $100 million+ very easily on the basis of the numbers, not something that $90 million action movies do much these days.*) This likely made a sequel inevitable, with, just like the gambling on summer by the backers of The Fall Guy, the studio probably hoping to do better still with a June release than one in January, the more in as this summer's competition was not terribly strong in that patch.
How did it go?
Domestically Bad Boys 3 opened to $63 million domestically, or $77 million in June 2024 terms. The "multiplier" for the opening weekend was about 3.3--the movie more than tripling that opening gross over its fuller run.
By contrast Bad Boys 4 (Bad Boys: Ride or Die) had a weaker opening--debuting to $57 million, or about a quarter down in real terms. The movie has also not had better legs, with its take as of five weeks of play about $181 million--or about 73 percent of the former film's gross in June 2024 terms ($250 million or so).
Meanwhile, the international market, once again, did not come to the rescue. Bad Boys 3 made 48 percent of its money domestically, 52 percent internationally, while the fourth film has had a rough 50/50 split so far, leaving it with about $365 million globally--against that aforementioned $520 million or so. The result is that without much further to go the new movie has taken in just 70 percent of what its predecessor did--a significant drop rather than a significant improvement, suggestive of the obsession of Hollywood with running every success straight into the ground and beyond. Still, if the makers of the film really did keep the production budget down to $100 million (in real terms, a smaller budget than the $90 million budget of Bad Boys 3 four and a half inflationary years ago) it is possible, even probable, that this sequel will in the end eke out a profit as well--though especially given the cost of promotion of the film in the summer season, and the claims the stars may have on the film's revenue (plausibly, part of how the budget was held down), likely not one so great that the Suits will rush to green-light a Bad Boys 5 if they have any brains at all. Alas, one is far more likely to lose than win betting on that, the more in as the unhinged sequel-nobody-asked-for-mongers grow only more desperate all the time.
* Taking the $90 million production budget, and estimating from that a final outlay in the $200 million or at most $300 million range when everything is added in; and weighing that against the movie's making $200 million net at the box office and likely matching that in home entertainment, etc. for a total net revenue of $400 million; and we get a $100 million profit (or maybe much more).
In the End, Just How Badly Did Things Go For Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga?
Of course, even allowing for that one may have wondered if a weak opening might not be redeemed by good weekend-to-weekend holds--especially as fairly decent legs helped the Mad Max movie make what money it did (the movie picking up a not bad 3.4 times its domestic opening), and there may be a trend toward movie grosses being less front-loaded. Alas, far from bouncing back from a weak opening with a good run of that kind, the movie did less well than its predecessor that way (its pretty much ended run seeing it take in just 2.6 times what it did in its first three days). Meanwhile the international markets were no source of salvation--the domestic/international split in the global gross for this one pretty much the same as with Fury Road (a 39/61 domestic/international split in the take against 41/59 for the 2015 film). Accordingly the $105 million it has picked up internationally so far compares poorly with the last movie's $226 million back in 2015 (and nearly $300 million in today's terms). The result is a total of $173 million in the till--about a third what the original made in inflation-adjusted terms (its $380 million equal to some $500 million in 2024 dollars).
Am I surprised? Not really. After that opening I thought even $200-$250 million for this one optimistic, a figure I contrasted with the nearly $400 million I thought the movie might need to eventually break even. The result is that what I said in late May still stands:
the movie may have as good a shot at making Deadline's list of biggest box office flops come April 2025 as anything released so far this year--though it is also the case that this year is young, and many bigger movies seem likely to have receptions no better than this before New Year's Day.
Inside Out 2's Staying Power at the Box Office
Speculating about Inside Out 2 as its opening approached I suggested that as a sequel it could not be expected to have the same box office "legs" as its predecessor, especially in the event of a strong opening, with all the front-loading of the gross it tends to portend. As it happened the movie has had a rather stronger opening than the original (even after adjustment for inflation)--but is also at least matching the original with respect to endurance in theaters. The first film roughly quadrupled its opening weekend gross in North America (opening with $90 million and finishing with $356 million). The second film is well on its way to doing the same, with 3.7 times its opening taken in on Friday night ($572 million now in the till), while showing every sign of making up the rest of the distance (another $40 million will do the job), getting so near as to make no difference, or maybe even exceeding it, before it departs theaters altogether--though whatever happens there is no denying that it has already been a major success by this measure, like every other.
All this is, of course, welcome news to Hollywood--clearly hoping that this is a sign of a return to the pre-pandemic norm with regard to the ability of brand name franchise films like this to get people to theaters at the old rates. Yet one can also see the performance of the film as indicative of something else, namely the same thing that helped make Top Gun 2 such a hit back in 2022--the combination of particularly intense media cheerleading by the media with the unusual faintness of the competition. (Family films like IF and The Garfield Movie proved less than colossal hits, and the Despicable Me sequel came along only when Inside Out 2 was in its fourth weekend of play, and even then achieved a respectable gross rather than a sensational one, taking eight days to hit the $150 million mark that Inside Out 2 did in its first three.)
The same combination of cheerleading and weak competition will also work in favor of that other big brand-name Disney production which will be hitting theaters just as Inside Out 2 is fading from them, Deadpool & Wolverine. Along with the undeniably great press for the film, it has had very little to compare with it with regard to big, splashy action this summer thus far (cough, cough, The Fall Guy, cough, cough, Furiosa), and seems unlikely to get any in what remains of the season after its release--the more in as the expectations for Twisters run so far behind those for Deadpool, and by big summer movie standards the prospects for Borderlands look as bleak as the latter movie's space Western landscapes.
All this is, of course, welcome news to Hollywood--clearly hoping that this is a sign of a return to the pre-pandemic norm with regard to the ability of brand name franchise films like this to get people to theaters at the old rates. Yet one can also see the performance of the film as indicative of something else, namely the same thing that helped make Top Gun 2 such a hit back in 2022--the combination of particularly intense media cheerleading by the media with the unusual faintness of the competition. (Family films like IF and The Garfield Movie proved less than colossal hits, and the Despicable Me sequel came along only when Inside Out 2 was in its fourth weekend of play, and even then achieved a respectable gross rather than a sensational one, taking eight days to hit the $150 million mark that Inside Out 2 did in its first three.)
The same combination of cheerleading and weak competition will also work in favor of that other big brand-name Disney production which will be hitting theaters just as Inside Out 2 is fading from them, Deadpool & Wolverine. Along with the undeniably great press for the film, it has had very little to compare with it with regard to big, splashy action this summer thus far (cough, cough, The Fall Guy, cough, cough, Furiosa), and seems unlikely to get any in what remains of the season after its release--the more in as the expectations for Twisters run so far behind those for Deadpool, and by big summer movie standards the prospects for Borderlands look as bleak as the latter movie's space Western landscapes.
On the Word About Shrek 5
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.
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.
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.
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